Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom spent years side by side on the “Lord of the Rings” films, and Variety notes that none of the three biggest names Netflix just added to “The Gentlemen”, Robert Carlyle included, has worked with Guy Ritchie before. Netflix confirmed on October 23rd that production is underway on Season 3 in the United Kingdom and Morocco, and it announced eight additions led by Wood, Bloom and Carlyle. Dexter Fletcher, Bruna Marquezine, Ed Speleers, Saffron Burrows and Bugzy Malone complete the list. Netflix has not said who any of them will play, and no premiere date has been announced.
Eddie Horniman (Theo James) and Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) are back as the partners at the center of the series, who built their alliance inside the criminal underworld after Eddie inherited Halstead Manor. Variety lists Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone), Lady Sabrina (Joely Richardson), Geoff (Vinnie Jones), Charly (Jasmine Blackborow), Jack (Harry Goodwins) and Aisha (Maya Jama) among those returning, and Deadline names the same actors. Two familiar names are missing from those lists, Daniel Ings and Giancarlo Esposito, and Collider’s headline says the new cast is “Officially Confirmed After Major Star Exit” without ever naming anyone. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “The Gentlemen” Season 2.
Netflix has not said who any of them will play, and no premiere date has been announced.”
Nothing in Collider’s article fills in the name, so the exit has to be pieced together from other reports. Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva says two core cast members who have been with the series since the start will not return for Season 3. They are Freddy Horniman (Daniel Ings), Eddie’s cocaine-addicted older brother, and Stanley Johnston (Giancarlo Esposito), the American billionaire and drug kingpin. Variety says only that neither actor is listed among the returning cast, which is a softer way of describing the same gap.
Deadline quotes Ings from an October interview with HATC Magazine, in which he said “I’m not in the next one, so that’s a fun sense of closure” and gave no specific reason for leaving. He framed Freddy’s ending as a clean stopping point, saying the character “just ends as this wild, broken, crazy, probably mumbling into the ether somewhere in the British countryside”. He called the job “a lot of fun” and “a great experience”, and he said he will always be grateful to have helped create Freddy.
What Ings did describe is a set where little stayed fixed for long, which is a useful picture of how Ritchie makes this show. According to Woman & Home’s account of the interview, Ritchie “kind of throws the script out on the morning” and would sometimes “rewrite the script and give you brand new pages” while the cast improvised. That churn, Woman & Home reports, left Ings feeling he “couldn’t even really rely on the scripts that you were given” as he tried to track the brothers’ conflict through each new draft.
On his first day on the second series, Ings recalled that Ritchie sat him down and said “We went too far with the humour; we got to pull it back.” Freddy, the comic engine of Season 1, was being steered away from the jokes, and Ings sounded untroubled by it. He said “You don’t want to keep playing the same game with the audience of this guy kind of comedically messing things up for them.”
Esposito’s exit is the less explained of the two. Deadline notes that Stanley ended Season 2 under arrest over his illegal dealings, and Variety’s August report on the Season 2 trailer describes him whispering “You are destined to rule, forge your own path” in Eddie’s ear. Neither outlet quotes Esposito or Netflix on the departure, so how the writers dispose of Stanley, whether through the arrest, a prison sentence or something less tidy, is unknown. Between them, Freddy and Stanley gave Eddie a family to be embarrassed by and a mentor to be tempted by. Season 3 will have to supply both from somewhere else.
The logline is the only plot Netflix has offered, and Variety, Deadline and What’s on Netflix all print it the same way. It says Eddie and Susie “embark upon their most audacious project yet: building a casino in the Middle East.” It then asks whether the Duke’s ambition has “finally gone too far”, which sounds like a promise that Eddie’s climb from heir to operator is about to cost him something. A casino is also a convenient place to put new faces, since it needs investors, rivals, regulators and muscle. That is where Wood, Bloom and Carlyle may slot in, though nothing from Netflix confirms it.
What’s on Netflix reports that the shoot began earlier than most production trackers expected. Cameras rolled on September 13th in Rabat, Morocco, with the desert town of Erfoud used for the Middle East material, as Le360 first reported. The crew then returned to the United Kingdom in early October, and the same outlet says James and Scodelario were spotted in Poole, Dorset, in the second week of that month. The cast was photographed shooting in Kilburn, London, on October 19th, according to the same outlet. Netflix’s own line, as What’s on Netflix quotes it, is that Season 3 “is currently being filmed in the UK and Morocco”. Variety had reported at the renewal in August that no scripts were finalized yet.
Ritchie remains the creative center. He created the series, which is set in the world of his 2019 film of the same name, and he writes Season 3 with Matthew Read and directs alongside Eran Creevy. James is credited as an executive producer with Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson, Read, Will Gould, Simon Crawford Collins, Frith Tiplady and, for Miramax TV, Jonathan Glickman and Alix Jaffe. The season runs eight episodes of 60 minutes each, produced by Moonage Pictures for Netflix and Miramax TV. Variety says Ritchie’s statement came with the August renewal, and Collider and Epicstream reprint it alongside the production news. In it he says the ambition of the show “has accelerated, the world has expanded and the consequences carry weight” and that a third season “felt inevitable.”
Netflix renewed the series on August 24th, days ahead of Season 2’s September 3rd debut. What’s on Netflix reports that Season 2 opened at number three on the global English-language TV list with 6.7 million views before climbing to number one the following week. Season 1 reached Netflix on March 7th, 2024, according to the same outlet, so the gap between the first two seasons ran well over two years. What’s on Netflix points out that Season 2 took around 18 months from cameras to release and puts the new season’s most probable window at late 2027 or early 2028. Netflix has given no date or window of its own.
One name is conspicuously absent from the call sheet. Deadline reports that Meghan Markle, the “Suits” alumna, had held conversations about a role in Season 3 but that it is “no longer in the cards.” Variety says rumors had surfaced about her joining but that it ultimately did not happen. What’s on Netflix adds that the reported involvement dominated the renewal news cycle before it was walked back within days.
The newcomers’ résumés point in different directions. Carlyle arrives with “Trainspotting”, “The Full Monty” and “Once Upon a Time” behind him, and Variety and Deadline both tag him with “Line of Duty.” Variety and What’s on Netflix point to “Yellowjackets” as Wood’s recent television work, while the same two outlets credit Bloom with “The Cut.” Fletcher appeared in Ritchie’s 1998 film “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”, and Malone previously worked with the director on “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre”, according to Nerdtropolis and the Holly Chatter site. Marquezine is known for “Blue Beetle”, and Speleers and Burrows both carry “You” credits, with Burrows also in “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.”
The reunion lands during a busy stretch for Middle-earth. ComicBook notes that the next “Lord of the Rings” release is Season 3 of Prime Video’s “The Rings of Power” on November 11th, and that Wood is also back as Frodo in the film “The Hunt for Gollum.” That context makes the casting feel like a wink at fans, though Netflix has not framed it that way. Yahoo’s Holly Chatter write-up says it remains unclear whether the two actors will even share scenes.
Taken together, the announcement reads as a deliberate change of register for a series that began with a British duke discovering a cannabis farm beneath his inherited estate. By Season 3, going by the logline, Eddie is a man building a casino abroad, surrounded by prestige names and missing both the brother and the billionaire who gave the early seasons their comic roughness and their sense of temptation. That may land. The risk is that a show built on the friction between the manor and the underworld loses its center of gravity once the manor is no longer the point.
What Do You Think? Do Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom belong in Guy Ritchie’s world, or is this casting more reunion than fit? Can “The Gentlemen” keep its sense of humor without Freddy? And should Eddie’s casino bring back some of the roughness that Season 2 pulled away?
See you on the next binge!
