What do The Gentlemen and The Great Beauty by Paolo Sorrentino have in common? A distinctly Italian aesthetic, one that the creators decided to weave into the second season and that runs right through it, making an already captivating story even more enchanting and irresistible. It’s not us saying it, but the reveal came from the screenwriter Matthew Read himself, who, together with the creator Guy Ritchie and the leads Theo James and Kaya Scodelario, presented the new episodes at the international press conference.
The Gentlemen 2: Ambition at the Center of the New Season
There is a strong presence of Italy in The Gentlemen 2, but this “geographic expansion” also corresponds to a thematic broadening. In the new episodes, the creator and the screenwriter stressed, there are also more power, more desires and a moral line that becomes increasingly nuanced. A year after uniting forces in Bobby Glass’s criminal empire, Eddie and Susie are ready to take a bigger step. And to do so they must venture beyond the borders of Britain. Hence they head to Italy, specifically Lake Maggiore, among aristocratic estates and a criminal underworld built on rules, legacies, and personal connections. As the new season’s logline suggests, “ambition cannot be tamed.” It is precisely ambition that is one of the themes Guy Ritchie chose to build the new chapter around. “From a thematic perspective, it’s about understanding how one can ascend without imploding, how one can stay aggressive and ambitious and, at the same time, not be crushed by one’s own ego,” explained the director.
Eddie e Susie, alleati sempre più pericolosi
The second season thus picks up from a relationship that remains one of the series’ most interesting elements. Eddie and Susie work well together, but they do not necessarily share the same goals. They are partners, allies, and in some sense they understand each other, but each wants to build something of their own. For Kaya Scodelario, it’s precisely this element that generates the tension between the two. “Both continue to have their own individual ambitions, which necessarily do not coincide,” the actress explained. Susie sees Eddie as “a kind of very useful instrument that she has watched evolve” and, for this reason, she must keep him under control. But Susie also begins to question the consequences of her own role in Eddie’s transformation. “I decided to play a bit with the idea of the guilt he might feel for what I may have created, or what I may have unleashed within him,” Scodelario added. Their relationship remains founded on a contradiction: they need each other, but neither can afford to fully trust the other. “They are both the greatest threat and the greatest help to one another,” summarized Ritchie.
The Change in Eddie in the Second Season
The most evident change, however, concerns Eddie. In the first season he was a reluctant aristocrat suddenly forced to confront a hidden criminal empire. In the second season he begins to crave power and to understand how to wield it. Theo James described his arc as a gradual shedding of the morality with which we first met him. “In the first season he’s a moral man. He’s trying to survive and do the right thing, protect his family and save it from economic ruin,” he said. Now, instead, “he climbs a path and discovers his capacity to resort to violence for his own gain.” For Ritchie, though, Eddie’s journey isn’t only about crime. It’s a meditation on identity and heritage. “One of the fundamental concepts of The Gentlemen concerns breaking free from the curse of inheritance,” the director explained. Eddie is the perfect embodiment of this conflict: born into privilege, that same privilege threatens to become a cage.
From England to Italy: Sorrentino’s Inspiration
The choice of Italy, as explained by Ritchie, arose almost naturally from the story they wanted to tell. To go beyond the British aristocracy and English organized crime and to expand that world “it seemed necessary to evolve the setting, introducing the mafia.” But Italy offered something essential for continuing to explore the theme of inheritance: “There are aristocrats who are also impoverished,” he observed, an element interesting to explore for a series that continues to question the relationship between wealth received and power. And the contrast between England and Italy, according to Ritchie, isn’t as distant as one might think. “The Italians are, after all, bronzed Englishmen,” the director quipped, before pointing out a curious similarity between the two cultures: “There is a passion in Italians that the English secretly desire, while I think there is a stoicism in the British that desires the Italians.”
Italy, however, isn’t just a backdrop. It is also a precise source of aesthetic and cultural inspiration for the second season. And this is where Paolo Sorrentino enters the picture. Matthew Read revealed that it is Sorrentino himself, and in particular La Grande Bellezza, who influenced the way the series depicted Italy. “The vision Sorrentino has of Italian culture seemed to us a kind of very useful key to achieving what we wanted to do,” the screenwriter explained. The Sorrentinoan aesthetic was inserted, notably in the sixth episode where a grand and lavish party on Lake Maggiore appears. But this isn’t the only Italian element to have influenced the series. There is the music, fashion, and a warm color palette all Italian. Read also shared that he went to Milan during production to see a Bellini opera and later brought one of the arias he heard that evening into the series, using it in episode four.
What to Expect in the Third Season?
The third season of The Gentlemen has already been confirmed, and, according to Theo James, the challenge will be to continue growing the series without losing what made it so loved. “That would be our task even for the third season: to make it even better, we hope, to have it evolve and expand the world in all directions,” the actor explained. How far will Eddie and Susie be willing to push things? We expect absolutely everything.
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