The Gentlemen season three cast has been confirmed, with Robert Carlyle, Orlando Bloom and Elijah Wood joining Guy Ritchie’s Netflix crime drama as filming gets under way in Morocco.
Dexter Fletcher, Bruna Marquezine, Ed Speleers, Saffron Burrows and Bugzy Malone are also among the new additions to the series, which is returning with an expanded line-up.
Carlyle is known for playing the violent Begbie in Trainspotting, while Bloom and Wood starred together in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Joely Richardson, Jasmine Blackborow, Harry Goodwins, Benjamin Clementine and Maya Jama will reprise their roles in the third season.
The announcement coincided with the start of production, marked by a teaser featuring Theo James and Kaya Scodelario back in character. James plays Eddie Horniman, the Duke of Halstead, while Scodelario returns as Susie Glass.
Eddie is a former British military officer who inherits his estranged father’s country estate and discovers that it sits above a lucrative cannabis empire. Susie, the daughter of an imprisoned crime boss, runs the estate, while Vinnie Jones plays Geoff Seacombe, its loyal groundskeeper and gamekeeper.
The new series will see Eddie and Susie pursue what is described as their most ambitious venture yet: building a casino in the Middle East. The plan raises the question of whether the Duke’s ambition will finally take him too far.
Ritchie, who directs the series, said: “The ambition of The Gentlemen has accelerated, the world has expanded and the consequences carry weight.”
He added: “A third season felt inevitable, and I’m looking forward to pushing the boundaries of it further.”
James, Scodelario and Jones were also seen together on set in London earlier this week as production began.
The cast announcement follows reports that Meghan Markle had been in preliminary discussions about a possible role. Tina Brown, the former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, claimed that the proposed casting had been withdrawn after a backlash in the UK.
Those claims have not been reflected in the official season three cast announcement. A source close to the production team rejected suggestions that the series had used Meghan to generate publicity, saying: “This is not a show in need of stunt casting.”
Meghan was said to have been hurt by the reports and to be planning to take greater care over future scripts. The production team has denied claims that the streaming service used her possible involvement to promote the new season.
