‘The Outlaws’ Creatives & Cast on Breaking Stereotypes in Prime Video Series
Looking for a genre-bending new comedy-thriller that’s already set to return with another season? Then check out Prime Video‘s series The Outlaws.
The show from co-creators Stephen Merchant (The Office) and Elgin James (Mayans M.C.) takes a handful of very different individuals and forces them to work together over the course of 100 hours of community payback (a.k.a. community service). Originally debuting on BBC One in the U.K. last year, viewers may have heard about it as the show where Christopher Walken paints over a Banksy, but it’s so much more than that.
(Credit: Prime Video)
Set in the picturesque English city of Bristol, what starts as a gathering of vastly different criminals turns into a heart-stopping mission to protect one another and possibly get paid along the way. “It began life as a film script actually, but we discovered that there were too many characters really,” Merchant tells TV Insider. “And the original film script we actually set in LA.”
Once the plan changed to a television series, Merchant shares, “it felt like [Bristol] seemed like a good place to think about setting it. Because I knew that city and I understood where those characters would live… Also, it’s a very visual city, it’s very colorful. It’s got lots of street art, it’s the home of Banksy, among others,” Merchant adds.
So, what brought Merchant and James together in the first place? “We’re the perfect metaphor for the show,” James notes. “We look very different. We come from very different places, have different experiences. And as soon as we met, we just fell in.”
(Credit: Prime Video)
“We didn’t seem like obvious kind of compadres,” Merchant admits, “but we hit it off. I think we have a very shared sensibility, both in terms of what we like in movies and TV, but also in worldview really.” That shared worldview brings to life some very colorful characters including Merchant’s own Greg, an in-over-his-head lawyer who is paying the community back after being caught with a prostitute.
Others include Walken’s conman Frank, a conservative businessman, a liberal activist, a celebutante, a promising young student named Rani (Rhianne Barreto), and a down-on-his-luck young man named Christian (Gamba Cole). “My character is in community payback because they like to steal things,” teases Barreto. “And they have a tendency of stealing jewelry and clothes and stuff like that.”
“Mine is a little bit more tricky,” Cole hints of his character who plays a central role in two parallel storylines this season. “I can’t really reveal my reason, but just know he’s there.” What Cole will say about his character is, “growing from a certain background in certain areas, you are limited to certain options.”
And while stereotypes are pushed onto him, Cole teases, “over the span of the six episodes, you actually get to know him and see the nuance in him.” Like Cole’s Christian, the other characters in this series are also subverting stereotypes. “Every character in the show is just a full, layered, complex person that can feel anger and rage and love and joy and all these things and it is not exclusive to a type of person,” Barreto confirms.
Out of their rag-tag team of community payback participants, Rani and Christian are early to strike up a bond. “I would say initially it’s quite a turbulent one,” Cole says of their onscreen connection. “They come from two completely different backgrounds, two different structural households. They initially clash, but I think over time as they continue to get to know each other and as they spend time, not only just in community payback, but outside of that, they end up finding that opposites attract sometimes.”
See how opposites attract and connections are formed in The Outlaws when Season 1 arrives on Prime Video and get an exclusive sneak peek with the clip, above.
The Outlaws, Season 1 Premiere, Friday, April 1, Prime Video
