After a week of pomp, ceremony and royal conceit thanks to the latest season of The crownthe British capital is now about to be drenched in blood and guts once again.
The second season of Gangs of Londonthe super-violent crime series originally created by The robbery writer/director Gareth Evans and produced by Pulse Films and Sister, has arrived on AMC+, grabbed the guts of the first performance in 2021 and managed to ramp up the eye-watering carnage – and death count – some more.
Ṣọpẹ Dìrísu is back in the lead role as ex-squad turned undercover cop Elliot Finch, now forced to work as a hitman for a group of shady billionaires known as The Investors, while many of the (surviving) mob bosses from season 1 return battling for control of London’s criminal networks.
But there’s a new – terrifying – addition to the mix in Koba, a Georgian drug lord and arms dealer enlisted to restore order. Sporting peroxide blonde hair and an OTT wardrobe (think shiny velor tracksuits, colorful shirts, and inordinate amounts of chest hair), Koba — played by veteran Arab-American actor Waleed Zuaiter — is arguably the wildest new antagonist on TV screens this year; a ruthless, unpredictable, psychotic and peacock-like control freak who sees the city as his for the taking and has no problem breaking unwritten gang codes and attacking his rivals’ families to terrorize them into submission.
For Zuaiter, most recently seen on TV in Hulu’s critically acclaimed Baghdad Centralbut whose long list of credits includes House of cards, London has fallen and the Oscar-nominated feature film Omar (which he also produced), Koba was a total break from the norm, a rare opportunity to step into the shoes (sneakers in this case) of someone completely different.
As he explains The Hollywood Reporternot only was Koba not from the Middle East (Zuaiter rejected an offer to make the character his own nationality, Palestinian), but he was a unique character that he could pour his own creativity into (the hair was his idea) and really have fun with.
You’ve played bad guys in the past, but they were more cunning than downright terrifying like Koba. How did your role come your way?
When I was in London for the Baghdad central premiered in 2020, my reps had set up meetings with several casting directors and producers, and one of them was with Kelly Valentine Hendry, who cast Gangs. Apparently she had me in mind for the part of Koba from that meeting.
What on earth did you do during the meeting!?
Ha! I think it was because I told her I really wanted to play something else. Baghdad central was really great in the sense that it was this heroic Arabian character, which you rarely see. But I said I wanted to do more of what I was trained to do as an actor, which was to just step outside of yourself and explore and learn and challenge yourself. And when I got the scenes, I was just really blown away. They were scenes you could really sink your teeth into.
Was Koba fully formed when you got the role or were you able to build it yourself?
Sort of both. I had about three quarters of a page description of the character. The terrifying part of him was very clear to me in this one sentence which said Koba knows at his core that you are a predator or a prey. And so he was one step ahead of his opponents. And to me, that was such a primal description of him. But then, right after, it said he was a foodie and he was really interested in London cuisine. So it was very clear to me that he was something else, and he was seen as a character for us to enjoy. So I fed that and kept feeding it back, and the creatives were so open to my ideas.
What were your suggestions?
The first was that this character is so different from me that I just want to look very different physically. During the first lockdown of the pandemic, my wife said, “Listen, we’re not leaving the house for a while, I want you to shave my head.” So I thought, “Okay, I’ll shave your head if you dye my hair blonde.” So that’s how I discovered the blonde. I had done this before I even got the Gangs audition. But then I had to repaint it because I had to read for it Oslo. I was a guy from Gaza and I was like, well, I can’t be blonde for that! But I did take a lot of pictures, and then the Gangs role came, I told [season 2 lead director] Corin Hardy that I either go bald or blonde because I have to be extremely different physically. He said they had seen bald before on the show so I sent him some blonde pics and he loved it. It fit the description perfectly, because Koba is like this new fish in this much bigger pond, like a kid in a candy store when he comes to London and thinks he can own the city, and he’s one to peacock.
And Koba’s blonde hair really fits into his hugely colorful wardrobe, which includes a particularly cool-looking auburn tracksuit. Were you also involved in this?
The tracksuits were already in there, but I felt like the tracksuit look was something we’d seen before on Eastern European gangsters. So I said, look, Koba makes a lot of money, he has blond hair, and he’s new to London, he’s like a tourist… he should dress like he’s on vacation and just enjoy every minute of it. So there was a gold jacket with blue pants and these Cobra sneakers. I took home about three quarters of my wardrobe – half for my wife to wear. But Koba is a guy who really tries to seduce you, so I wanted to show as much chest hair as possible. But there were months where it was really cold when we were shooting and I thought, God, I’m a little sorry about this!
Koba is described as Georgian, but to be honest I never really felt he was of any particular nationality. He seemed bad International and could have been from any number of different places.
That’s such a great response because when I looked up the Georgian accent they said it’s often mistaken for Israeli, Russian or Turkish. And it really is this kind of mixture.
When I booked it, they said that because I am Palestinian myself, I could make it Palestinian. I’ve played the Arab bad guys in a lot of things in my career, but I wanted to have fun with this and not have this cultural responsibility, and I just wanted to be an artist. So, having never done the accent before, I got very specific and found a Georgian in London to record my dialogue. And there were really big mispronunciations of words and accents in the wrong places. So I really had fun with the cadence and rhythm.
Not a particularly big or tough guy himself, Koba has an absolutely terrifying presence, like you can’t predict what he’s going to do next and could snap in the blink of an eye. He kind of reminded me of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. Did you get inspiration for him from other characters on screen?
I was a big fan of Christoph Waltz inglorious bastards and remember you thought the character himself enjoyed what he did in terms of the villainy of it and the psychological manipulation of people. And I also felt that Christoph Waltz enjoyed the work he had to do. To me, that was very much like myself with Koba. I’m just always more intrigued by characters who are psychologically tortured, to me that’s scarier.
After the first season of Gangs came, many people immediately linked Ṣọpẹ Dìrísu with the James Bond job, saying he would be perfect to take over from Daniel Craig. Now that you’ve worked with him, what do you think?
All the way. And he’s also an incredible human being, just very disciplined. He’s such a soulful actor and I think he’s going to go very far. He’s played American Football and has some boxing experience, and that sort of thing really helps actors. It becomes very instinctive and just heightens all of your reactions. He is also a very meditative person. He’s not chatting between setups and shots. He’s someone you see standing in the corner with his eyes closed. And I tend to do the same thing, and I feel like you kind of have grounds. So every time we had a scene together, I felt like we really connected on a deeper level.