'The Gentlemen' Cast Interview
‘The Gentlemen’ cast members Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Hugh Grant, Henry Golding and Michelle Dockery discuss collaborating with director Guy Ritchie, their reaction to the ridiculous amount of c-words in the movie, and more in this interview with CinemaBlend’s Corey Chichizola. Plus, Henry Golding reveals what it was like filming ‘The Gentlemen’ and ‘Last Christmas’ at the same time.
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00:00 Congratulations on dressing so in such a dapper fashion.
00:04 It's only appropriate.
00:05 Had to look like a gentleman.
00:06 Yes.
00:07 Now, I can't be specific about the heroes and zeros,
00:12 but our protagonist is a hungry animal.
00:15 Our antagonist has indirectly started a war.
00:18 I had such a good time seeing this movie.
00:22 It took so many turns and was so stylistic.
00:24 I really had a good time.
00:26 Matthew, your character in particular
00:29 took me a lot of places.
00:30 There were a lot of layers.
00:31 He's very multifaceted.
00:33 How was the process for you?
00:35 What did you discover as you were filming about him?
00:37 I felt like I had a good line on who he was,
00:41 what he wanted, what he was trying to do going into it.
00:44 I think that the main thing that I didn't know
00:47 was gonna happen was how much you change things,
00:51 how much you have to adapt on the day
00:53 if you choose to play with guys rewriting of scenes,
00:58 which he does heavily,
00:59 which at first was extremely frustrating for me.
01:02 I'm like, "I've been working on this for..."
01:06 But then all of a sudden it clicks and you go,
01:08 "Actually, what he's coming up with is better,
01:12 "so I'm gonna be game."
01:14 And so then there's an agility
01:16 that I learned to bring every day,
01:19 to an extent more so than I've ever done
01:22 with any other film.
01:23 But also this type of film allows for,
01:27 it is a musicality.
01:29 It's part of the style you're talking about.
01:31 His dialogue is very precise.
01:33 He has very precise opinions on what that is.
01:36 There's a meter that Guy's listening for,
01:39 and yes, he's written it,
01:41 but he doesn't know what that meter sounds like
01:43 until the actor's coming out of our mouths
01:45 and going back and forth.
01:46 You gentlemen have both worked with the director,
01:50 Guy Ritchie, before.
01:51 I was wondering what makes him such a great collaborator?
01:55 - Um, his willingness to collaborate.
01:58 He really is very open to the process.
02:02 You know, he has this, the Guy Ritchie prism
02:04 with which everything has to sort of go through,
02:07 but I found he has a tendency to give all the people
02:12 he hires, not just the actors,
02:16 but cinematographer and production design
02:18 and costume designers, everything,
02:19 a certain level of autonomy and expectation
02:21 that you're gonna show up and do your job
02:24 without being babysat, you know,
02:26 which, you know, definitely inspires you
02:29 to do your best work.
02:30 - Well, no, I think that's right,
02:31 and I have found, the older I get,
02:33 that the better directors, the best directors,
02:37 are more like that.
02:39 It's extraordinary.
02:40 They barely seem to have a script,
02:42 and they have very few expectations
02:45 at the beginning of the day of,
02:46 "I want it to be like this."
02:47 They get really good at, "What am I getting?
02:50 "What am I getting, and do I like it?"
02:52 And altering it on the spot, directing on the hoof.
02:55 - That doesn't feel like it's a hit at the moment.
02:58 - Out of fucking way, you came in, you cunt!
03:00 - Is it one of those?
03:02 - Sure.
03:03 - Could be.
03:04 - Oh, cocky.
03:05 (laughing)
03:06 - Another thing that stood out to me
03:08 was the ample use of the C word in this movie.
03:11 ♪ 'Cause you're not going out the way you came in ♪
03:13 ♪ You deluded, duck-eating cunt ♪
03:15 (laughing)
03:16 - There's C-bombs left and right.
03:17 I was wondering, as actors, like,
03:18 what was your relationship to just, like,
03:21 every day, dropping C-bombs?
03:23 - It's quite, I thought it was quite kind of,
03:26 I don't know, therapeutic in a sense.
03:29 - Yeah, it's fun.
03:30 - You don't often get to sort of scream with venom.
03:34 - That word.
03:35 - Those types of, sort of, words.
03:37 - Or even throw it off as a side-handed joke
03:41 and throw it away.
03:42 And then, as you know, America has a very different
03:44 relationship with that word than Britain.
03:48 - Yeah, it did infect the rest of my life.
03:52 My young children say almost nothing else now.
03:55 - You know, it's an Englishman's prerogative
03:58 to drop the C-bomb.
04:00 So, we were making a film about good English gentlemen,
04:04 so we'd be remiss not to.
04:06 - But it's a much, much more frowned upon word
04:09 here in America, I think.
04:10 - Right.
04:11 - So I dread to think what that's going to do
04:13 to this film.
04:14 - Well, I think it puts you in the setting
04:16 that you're speaking of.
04:17 It puts you in the setting that you're supposed to be in,
04:18 like you said.
04:19 - Mm.
04:20 - Hugh, I was wondering, you've played so many, like,
04:22 really lovable characters throughout your career.
04:25 There's been a lot of good guys.
04:26 Is it enjoyable to flex those kind of, like,
04:30 bad boy muscles in projects like this
04:32 and be someone a little more shysty?
04:34 - Well, I think the character I play in this film
04:37 is rather lovable.
04:39 I loved him.
04:40 I'm sad that no one else does.
04:42 - I want you to play a game with me, Ray.
04:44 - I don't want to play a game.
04:45 - Oh, please.
04:46 - No.
04:47 - I said play a game with me, Ray.
04:48 - I mean...
04:49 Right.
04:51 - Lovely.
04:52 - He lives in the morally gray.
04:52 - I know what you mean.
04:53 He's appalling.
04:54 He's an absolute...
04:56 Yeah, he's sleazy and disgusting.
05:00 Yeah, it is cathartic.
05:01 Anyone would say that.
05:01 You'd say that.
05:02 It's better to, it's more fun playing baddies, isn't it?
05:04 - Yep.
05:05 - And easier.
05:06 - You're too smart to be blackmailing us, Fletcher.
05:08 - Yeah.
05:09 (dramatic music)
05:10 - These people are going to clean house,
05:12 and you are part of that house.
05:14 (dramatic music)
05:15 - Henry, we've been seeing you in a lot of movies
05:18 where you're super nice and charming.
05:21 Was it exciting to kind of flex a different muscle
05:24 and be kind of like, sheisty and terrible?
05:27 - Yeah, this was definitely a departure of...
05:30 It's funny, 'cause I was filming
05:32 at the same time last Christmas.
05:34 So one day I'd be on the streets of London,
05:37 prancing around, kind of falling in love with Emilia Clarke,
05:41 and then the next day, it's Sap.
05:43 Opposite Matthew here, and just like throwing daggers
05:47 at each other in such an intense scene.
05:50 So having to switch from those two characters
05:54 throughout pretty much October and November
05:57 when we were filming, it was amazing.
05:59 It was really sort of the ability to inhabit
06:04 such polarizing characters during a small kind of time frame
06:11 that kind of allows you that sort of flexibility.
06:14 You become attuned to it.
06:17 And so it was a joy sort of waking up and like,
06:21 what, who am I today?
06:22 (laughing)
06:23 You know what I mean?
06:24 And sometimes I would start reading
06:27 sort of my script for last Christmas
06:29 in the dry eye kind of voice.
06:30 I don't know if you ever do that.
06:31 You sort of start adding a couple of C-bombs.
06:34 It's weird.
06:36 The more sort of swear words that were coming out of my mouth
06:39 it was just putting me into that dry eye kind of state.
06:42 - Did you keep it quite separate?
06:43 Like were you learning lines on set for each?
06:47 - I was learning at the same time,
06:48 but it was just switching.
06:51 And it was weird 'cause my wife would come into the room
06:55 as I was reading the different scripts
06:56 and she would know what script I was reading
06:59 because just the atmosphere in the room
07:02 would be really dark and tense.
07:04 And she'd be like, she'd come in, she'd be like,
07:06 do, do, do, do.
07:06 (laughing)
07:07 I'd read in dry eye, like I'll leave him alone.
07:09 - I was also very taken by how the violence in this movie
07:13 was very random.
07:15 Sometimes it's hilarious.
07:16 - Please.
07:17 - Sorry for Hukanda for Huk.
07:18 - Please.
07:19 - You know, it's explosive.
07:20 (explosion)
07:23 How did that factor into your process?
07:25 The fact knowing that these things
07:27 were coming out of nowhere
07:28 and you were gonna hit the audience in the face.
07:31 - That's one of the delights of Guy Ritchie's films.
07:34 You know, we were saying that earlier,
07:36 every character has a very clear identity,
07:38 but if you're gonna have many immovable forces
07:42 where the plot has you intersect,
07:43 something's gotta give.
07:45 It can happen with a jackknife.
07:48 It can happen immediately.
07:50 It can happen in the middle of the most comedic scene.
07:53 I think that's part of the playfulness
07:54 that Guy does well in a movie like this.
07:57 - One of the things that really stuck out to me
07:59 was how ultra-stylized it was.
08:01 I was wondering how cue it in to the subtitles
08:05 or the cue cards, the little editing choices.
08:09 Was that in the script?
08:10 Were you aware of that during the process?
08:12 - He told me it wasn't gonna be like that.
08:14 - Oh, really?
08:15 - I said, "Are you doing all your whizzing about nonsense?"
08:18 And he said, "No, no, no, no, no.
08:19 "We're doing it straight.
08:20 "We're doing it straight.
08:21 "We're gonna have classical music."
08:22 That was all rubbish as it turned out.
08:25 You haven't seen it yet.
08:25 - No, I haven't.
08:26 - But it is, it's quite stylized and sort of lock stockish.
08:30 - Yeah, it's heightened,
08:31 which I found really enjoyable as an audience member.
08:34 - Do you know what, I think part of that
08:35 is that Guy works very, very closely
08:38 and gives that sort of that thing we were talking about,
08:40 an enormous amount of autonomy to Jimbo, his editor.
08:44 And I think Jimbo sort of just gravitates
08:49 towards that style of filmmaking in the editing room.
08:53 So probably a lot of it has to do with their collaboration.
08:57 'Cause Guy said the same thing
08:59 on the last two films I did with him,
09:01 that it was gonna be this grand departure
09:03 and sort of an entry into very, very classic,
09:07 sensible filmmaking.
09:10 And it hasn't happened on both occasions, so.
09:13 - There's only one rule in this fucking jungle.
09:16 When the lion's hungry, he eats.
09:19 [gunshot]
09:22 [BLANK_AUDIO]