The Gentleman Star Not Returning For Season 3 Is As Bad For Guy Ritchie As Tom Hardy Leaving MobLand

While Tom Hardy isn’t leaving MobLand after all, this persistent rumor about Guy Ritchie’s popular crime thriller has seemingly come true with another show of his, The Gentlemen, losing a similarly pivotal central star. The news that Tom Hardy was seemingly leaving MobLand season 2 sounded like a disaster for Guy Ritchie’s hit gangster show. After 2019’s The Gentlemen saw Ritchie revisit the charming Cockney mob comedy of Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, MobLand marked a more mature, darker, and more grounded effort from the writer/ director.

Starring Hardy as the embattled mob fixer Harry Da Souza, MobLand season 1 focused on the splintering Harrigan family, a paranoid London crime clan who were losing their iron grip on the city’s underworld. While the BBC’s similarly acclaimed This City Is Ours offered an even grittier, grimmer vision of mob dysfunction and power struggles, MobLand remained an atypically heavy and brutal show from Ritchie, who often tempered his earlier mob stories with a self-aware sense of humor.

It sounded like a major disaster in the making when reports surfaced claiming that Hardy had been fired midway through the production of MobLand season 2, or, alternatively, that he had finished filming the season, but would still exit the show before its third outing. These reports turned out to be entirely bogus, and Ritchie’s small-screen future appeared secure when season 2 of MobLand debuted to even better reviews than its predecessor. However, the news that Daniel Ings is leaving season 3 of Ritchie’s Netflix series The Gentlemen is the real-life disaster this rumor inadvertently predicted.

The Gentlemen Season 3 Losing Daniel Ings Is As Bad As MobLand Losing Tom Hardy

Also known as a star of the Game of Thrones spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Ings plays the volatile Freddy in The Gentlemen seasons 1 and 2. The older brother of the show’s perpetually beleaguered antihero Eddie, Freddy is a loose canon whose absurd and often dangerous antics mean he was never a serious contender to inherit the family’s sprawling criminal empire.

However, Ings’ wild-eyed Freddy was still aggrieved when he was passed over in favor of his brother, and Freddy’s misjudged revenge on his brother was central to The Gentlemen season 2’s twisty story. When another villain manipulates the unhinged Freddy into unforgivably betraying his brother, Eddie ends season 2 a broken and lethally angry man, forcing his brother to commit some nightmarish acts to make up for this tragic transgression.

All of this shifted the tone of the Netflix show, with Ings’ The Gentlemen season 2 role making his character more tragic than before and the ending twist turning the cartoonish crime comedy into something darker, nastier, and more dramatic (if no less wild and absurd). Thus, Ings’ sudden exit from season 3 leaves The Gentlemen with half of its biggest conflict absent, and makes the shocking twist ending of season 2 feel entirely moot.

How The Gentlemen Season 3 Can Work Around Daniel Ings' Exit

Without giving away too many major spoilers, suffice it to say that season 2’s ending sacrificed a major character for the sake of making the feud between the brothers more dramatic. This fundamentally altered Eddie’s character arc as, until now, the comparatively cautious character was, like This Is Our City’s Michael, obsessed with trying to make the family’a criminal business legitimate.

Thus, The Gentleman season 3 will now need to radically rethink its plot in the wake of Ings’ departure. It is likely that Ritchie’s Netflix show will, ironically, start to feel more like the darker, more grounded MobLand now that The Gentlemen season 3 is missing one major comedic character and has already bid adieu to a character that might have redeemed Eddie.