Warrior's Andrew Koji attacks Gangs of London Season 3

“Gangs three is built around two main stories,” says Gangs of London Season 3’s new executive producer and lead director, Kim Hong-Sun. “Elliot (Sopé Dìrísù) has become the leader of the London gangs, but things go wrong when dangerous fentanyl turns up in the drugs they've been shifting. This leads to loads of deaths across the city, including someone in the family of a key gang member. The big question of who tampered with the cocaine stirs up conflict. There’s betrayal between the gangs with plenty of secrets in the mix. At the same time, we start to learn why Elliot went undercover in the London gangs.”

With Kim Hong-Sun dubbing the season a “blood opera”, one new character promises to plunge the Gangs of London bloodbath into new depths. Zeek, played by Warrior Season 1-3 star Andrew Koji, is an assassin with a secret tie to one gang family. His actions will send ripples through the underworld well before he makes his first appearance. “Zeek is infiltrating our gangs in a very specific way, an incredibly mysterious figure who seems to operate almost like a lone wolf. A lot of his actions impact the very tops of our gangs,” hints co-executive producer Michael Eagle-Hodgson.

Fortunately we didn’t have to fight Andrew for some juicy insider information. To be clear, we’d lose. 

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Signing on for Gangs of London was no hardship, as Andrew was already a fan. “Season one was groundbreaking in terms of British action TV and cinematic action scenes. It’s always been a very interesting show with a mix of characters, a mix of drama and action. There’s nothing else really like it on British TV.” As for the series’ new showrunner, Andrew says, “Hong-Sun’s a character. He’s a real unique, quirky fella, and I think he brings a fresh filmmaking style to an essentially English TV show. His Asian influences and sensibility from making films in Korea is something I think that hopefully he injects into Gangs of London season three and spices it up a little bit.”

International man of mystery

Aside from the questions around who spiked the cocaine and why, exactly, Elliot ended up undercover, Zeek is the third big mystery in Gangs of London Season 3. “Zeek is an outsider, and he’s been hired to track down Sean Wallace (Joe Cole), but we don’t know who’s hired him, and we don’t know why,” reveals Andrew. “There’s actually a lot more going on with Zeek, as we’ll find out. And there’s more going on beneath the surface. Zeek is a bit of a lone wolf – an assassin who’s got a bit of a mysterious past that will also be unravelled throughout the show. He is driven by jealousy, ambition, revenge and a whole lot of anger and pain. He’s like a lost child. A puppy just wants to be loved. But … he won’t let anyone in.” 

A new kind of warrior

Warrior fans already know that Andrew can throw down, Bruce Lee-style. “I’ve done a few action things by this point, so it helped a lot, and enabled me to try and find the character behind the fight, and also with the technicalities of doing a fight scene for TV,” he says modestly. But we can expect a grittier, more street-fight inspired style from Zeek. “Zeek’s fighting style is a mix of everything. I think he spent most of his life training, getting beaten up, dealing with his emotions through fighting,” explains Andrew. “He is very street style, MMA, brutal, efficient, not very nice. I also think he’s someone who’s used to pain. That’s his world. And so he’ll do his best to invite his prey into that world if need be.”

Let’s dance!

Gangs of London fans will be counting down to drama when Elliot and Zeek come face-to-face in episode 6. And of course they will! In the Season 2 finale, Elliot chopped off Billy Wallace’s (Brian Vernel) arm and sent it to his brother Sean, luring him into a meeting that caused a deep rift between Sean and his mother, Marian (Michelle Fairley), who was happy to write off Billy. Elliot and Sean’s high noon-style showdown in the junkyard ended with Elliot hanging Sean by the neck from a construction crane before putting him behind bars – and promising Sean that he’d destroy the Wallace gang from the inside.

“They finally come clashing head to head, and they fight throughout an abandoned children’s home, which could probably very well be the home that Zeek grew up in himself,” reveals Andrew. “It was filmed over a period of maybe three to four days. They crash through to the bottom of the floor. Two opposing forces colliding together, with slightly different intentions, motivations and styles. Elliot is essentially losing control and has lost control throughout the fight because he thinks that Zeek is the one who killed his family, so he’s fighting like a wild animal. So Zeek is defending himself, essentially, because he’s not quite sure if he really wants him dead.”

“Zeek is a bit of a strategist,” adds Andrew. “Beneath the veneer of his image, where he might come across like this single-minded, cold-hearted assassin, he’s actually quite smart, and maybe he might be better off as an ally or someone who at least owes him something for season four. It was a pretty intense sequence to shoot. A lot of fun getting to dance with Sopé”

Sopé on the ropes

The fight isn’t just brutal physically, but emotionally. Sopé reveals, “There is so much aggression and violence in the abandoned children’s home fight because whilst Elliot has been through many scrapes in the series so far, many of which we’ve enjoyed, it seems like there’s this reservoir, this well of emotion and history of trauma that he’s finally able to unleash on the person he thinks who has ruined his life. He’s fighting with all of his being in this, because Zeek is his villain origin story. There is a real unleashing of everything that makes Elliot Elliot in this fight.”

Thanks to their epic fight scene, Andrew already has one major Gangs of London fan. “His character is so important for the future of the series as well as season three,” insists Sopé. “We needed to find an actor who had the chops, had the physical background to be able to carry that character and the story. Andrew does that with ease. He’s so amazing. I was actually a bit worried, because he actually has a martial arts background and I just pretend to do it. So I was like, ‘I’m going to get my ass kicked here!’. But he was super professional, super athletic. I learned lots from him.” 

Five Gang of London Season 3 fights to watch for

With Zeek and Elliot squaring off and Kim Hong-Sun promising to deliver “blood opera”, Gangs of London’s extraordinary action sequences are, as ever, central to the story. So look out for the following scenes.

• “This year, we welcomed Adam Horton as our fight designer, and he wanted to ramp it up. There’s an excellent sequence in the first episode that we shot in a real fairground,” hints Sopé. “When Adam showed us the pre-visualisation for that sequence during the read through, the whole room lost its s**t because of this one moment…the way the fight ends, honestly, when I saw it for the first time, I had to stand up and clap for him.”
• Orli Shuka, who plays Luan Dishaj, says, “In episode one and two, we’ve got the fairground battle, and it’s amazing how during the day that’s the happiest place for the kids. And at night time, the gladiators descend and take revenge through each other. We filmed in a real fairground…I was chasing a guy basically, you enter the house of mirrors, and I remember shooting every single one of them – pew, pew pew – and the bullets run out. I was seeing the guy coming through the window, and boom, a lot of glass in my face.” 
• Richard Dormer, who plays Cornelius Quinn – the big Irish bruiser who comes in to orchestrate the episode 2 jailbreak – reveals, “Elliot and Luan turn up, looking for somebody, and they get the sharp end of my stick…it is a lethal weapon. You can break bones and stab with it…it’s for gouging the face and ripping throats.” We’ll get to see him in combat in episode 3.
• Stunt supervisor Alex Gunn says of the church attack in episode 4, which was shot in a real church building in Kilburn Lane, “The fact we’ve actually got a willing padre to hand over his church to us and enjoy what’s going on, that’s really something.” Based on a hint from armourer Brian “Bear” Gavin we’d say expect guns. Lots of guns. 52 weapons and counting! And that’s not including makeshift weapons like a church candlestick that ends up in someone’s eye socket.
• The season’s most insane fight probably belongs to Narges Rashidi, who plays Lale. In episode 5, Lale goes into labour and gives birth in the middle of a long-running battle. “She’s giving birth and killing people while she’s doing that! We see her give birth to the placenta, and they find her, there’s a fight, and so she uses the placenta because there’s nothing. So, Lale-style, she grabs whatever she can find to defend herself, and she strangles a guy with the umbilical cord.” Doesn’t that just add a whole new dimension to being born into a gang family?

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