First Look At Christopher Walken & Eleanor Tomlinson in Stephen Merchant’s ‘The Outlaws’

Martin Holmes September 13, 2021, 9:36 am

Eleanor Tomlinson and Christopher Walken in The Outlaws — BBC/Amazon

Christopher Walken is getting his karaoke game on in the first look photos from Stephen Merchant‘s upcoming BBC and Amazon production, The Outlaws.

The new images also provide a first look at Eleanor Tomlinson‘s (Poldark) character Gabby, as well as Rhianne Barreto (Hanna) as Rani, Gamba Cole (Hanna) as Christian, and Merchant himself as Greg. The series also stars Darren Boyd (Killing Eve), Clare Perkins (EastEnders), Chloe Partridge (Siren Song), Jessica Gunning (Back), and Charles Babalola (Bancroft).

Walken will be making his British television debut in the series, which is written and directed by Merchant (The Office UK, Jojo Rabbit). One of the images shows the Oscar-winning actor in a red high-vis jacket standing next to a graffiti-covered wall, while another sees him in a pineapple-covered Hawaiian shirt singing karaoke.

The Outlaws revolves around seven strangers from different walks of life who are forced together through a Community Payback sentence in the city of Bristol, in the South West of England. While the archetypes are easy to pigeonhole at first, gradually, the façades begin to drop, and we learn to understand the real people underneath.

As these unlikely new friendships start to grow, the group finds themselves in a situation where they must unite to protect one of their own from Bristol’s most dangerous criminal gang.

The six-part crime-thriller is scheduled to air this Fall on BBC One and BBC iPlayer in the U.K., and then later on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Nordic countries. A second season has already been ordered and was filmed back-to-back with the first season.

This is not the only thriller TV series Walken is set to star in, as he will play Burt in Apple TV+’s upcoming series, Severance, directed by Ben Stiller. The show, which also stars Adam Scott (Big Little Lies) and Patricia Arquette (Escape at Dannemora), is set at Lumen Industries, where a “severance” program is used to separate the non-work memories of their employees from their work memories.