Warning: Spoilers for Series 1 & 2 of Gangs of London ahead.
At the beginning of series two, Alex Dumani is riding high as the Investor’s Golden Boy and has taken over at the helm of what was once the Wallace business empire.
His ambition, financial brilliance, and charisma have allowed him to climb to a position of power and live a life of excess as the legitimate face of money laundering in London.
Finally, where he’s dreamed of being; Alex is a respected and powerful business leader.
But it’s extremely hard to keep your balance once you’re positioned at the top, and what comes up must come down one way or another – and Alex discovers this the hard way.
Ahead of series two, Paapa Essiedu spoke to Sky about everything that happens to the character.
What can we expect from series two?
You can expect more of the same and bigger, better, bolder, more brash, more exciting, more bloody drama. Gangs of London has really set its own tone and style, so I think the aim is to push that to be even better than it was before.
And family’s still at the heart of it, isn’t it?
Yeah. We all know that families can be great, and they can be less than great as well. The heart of Gangs of London is about what families mean to people and the extent to which they’re willing to go in order to protect them.
Where do we find Alex at the beginning of the second series?
We find Alex now in charge of Dumani Enterprises Corporation, which has filled the void that was left at the end of series one with the demise of the Wallace organisation. Alex is running things and trying to juggle the responsibilities of dealing with these investors that run London. But the pressure gets greater and greater, as does his guilt about what happened at the end of series one with him and Sean, so we’ll see Alex trying to figure out ways to deal with that.
He’s in a dark place, isn’t he?
I think he’s in a relatively dark place because the Wallaces were very important to him, especially as a child, and Sean was his best mate. So not only is he grieving his best mate, but he’s also thinking about the part that he played in the demise of that, as well as looking after his family. He’s lost his sisters to prison, his dad is not the man that he once was, so there’s a lot at risk and there’s a lot at stake, and Alex feels like he’s trying to hold steady with all of that.
Tell me about the scene where he’s in the bathroom.
He’s about to go into a big, very important meeting where he needs to close a deal to secure the future of the organisation. He finds himself alone in the bathroom, confronted by a ghost of Sean, and Sean is covered in blood, and it’s really a kind of look backwards to the last time we saw him.
That whole thing happened so quickly and without preparation that Alex has never really had the opportunity to come to terms with it. It’s definitely still haunting him, even at these really important moments in his life.
Alex is part of the gangster family, but he’s not a gangster, is he?
There’s a dichotomy in terms of the kind of gangster that Alex is because there are many kinds of gangsters. There are gangsters that carry guns and gangsters that carry laptops, and I think Alex definitely falls into the latter category.
He’s definitely able to wield power, or he has ambitions to wield power in the same way as his father without having to resort to what his father did. He’s looking to be a more modern ‘business person’.
That doesn’t work out, does it?
He comes to quite a grisly end. Basically, the investors run out of patience with his plan of what he’s going to do with this money, and he ends up with a dot on his head.
He makes one last plea to Elliot to look after the family, to look after Shannon and Ed, and he finds himself on the edge of a building and unfortunately he ends up going over.
Tell me about when you read that in the script.
It’s a big thing, you know? There’s something about taking control, not allowing your fate to be decided by others. Alex has had to deal with that for a lot of his life: doing the right thing for his family, doing the right thing for the business, but what’s the right thing for him?
It’s a good moment for him to take control and take agency over his own destiny, but it’s sad in the fact that he’s really been backed into a corner and there’s not much he can do. So it was a bittersweet moment to read that in the script.
And what about filming it?
Filming that moment was a trip, you know, because there’s only so much CGI you could do with that kind of stuff. You still have to go for it. We constructed this kind of fake ledge, which still meant that I had to drop – almost too far I would say! – onto these big crash mats.
That was quite exciting actually to have the drama of the scenes side-by-side with the drama, I suppose, of the situation.
What did you think when you read in the scripts that Sean Wallace wasn’t dead?
Was I surprised? I just remembered we were very, very careful in the scene where he was shot to kind of leave a little doorway if we needed it for Sean Wallace to walk ceremoniously back through, so maybe I wouldn’t say that I was surprised, but I was definitely excited.
What was it like being back on set with Lucian?
Lucian is like my on-screen dad and my off-screen dad. I’ve got a very close relationship with him, and I’m such an admirer of his work. One of the things that I was most excited about when I was signing on to do this job was to work with, and act with, his calibre, and to watch him work.
He’s just brilliant. He makes it look so easy and so effortless, but he’s so hardworking and considered in his process. We could all stand to be more like Lucian [laughs].
What was the biggest takeaway from working with him?
Not to take life too seriously, you know? Me and him, we laugh way too much. It’s actually quite a serious relationship, but we also always have a giggle on set. He’s got a very short concentration span.
For someone who seems very serious, he’s really got a twinkle in his eye, and it always sets me off.