And not a moment too soon! How do I know, you may be asking yourself? Because I got to go on a set visit and, honestly, this was the journey of a lifetime. Read on to find out more.
Around the time I was feeling all kinds of London Film Festival withdrawals, I got an email from an esteemed publicist based in LA. The email started off with “Dear Journalist, Paramount+ is excited to invite you to the set of the global hit series, MobLand for a special tour of the Waverton House, press conference, and a special reception in support of the start of production for Season 2.” To those unaware of the joys of journalism, which are becoming fewer and fewer every day, this rates right up there with a world premiere starring Tom Cruise. It’s big, bigger than big, because it offers us, the forgotten spreaders of all things cool in cinema and TV, a chance to mingle and interact with the talent, not just observe them from afar. It also brings together a few people who live in different cities and seldom see each other in such calm surroundings — it’s usually Cannes, Berlinale or Venice and we are rushing to meet interviews and deadlines.
So, with my trigger finger itching to press “reply” before I even had the chance to read up the logistics, I did just that. Replied, and a big, fat yes it was.
But that reply, to visit what I thought was a house in the Cotswolds and have a chance to participate in a live press conference with the legendary Dame Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, plus a walk-through courtesy of cast members extrardinaires Joanne Froggatt & Anson Boon also came with a bit of homework.
You see, I’m not ashamed to admit that I hadn’t watched the Paramount+ series’ first season. I didn’t even know it was directed by Guy Ritchie and was yet another wonder project from the production company 101 Studios, this one created by Irish novelist and showrunner Ronan Bennett. In case you haven’t watched other 101 Studios series, they tend to be inspired by the very real, things happening all around us which we may or may not be unaware of, yet fictionalized just enough to make them palatable and perfectly entertaining. Think Landman, starring Billy Bob Thornton, which deals with all the too-serious issues of extracting oil on US soil like oilmen interacting with drug dealers along with utilizing fracking to secure the black gold, and yet finds a way straight into our hearts with its spellbinding narrative and outstanding cast.
But I digress.
In MobLand, “power is up for grabs as the Harrigans and Stevensons, two warring London crime families, clash in a kill-or-be-killed battle that threatens to topple empires and ruin lives,” as their logline reads. While the Harrigans live up in the Cotswolds, a truly expensive part of England north of the capital, their down-and-dirty business dealings take place in the most dangerous parts of London town. Their “poshness” as the English call it, is only rivaled by their ruthlessness, the dirty work of which they leave up to their “hands-on” man Harry Da Souza (played by Tom Hardy, in perfect tones of restraint).
At the head of this dynasty of crime are the patriarch and matriarch, Conrad and Maeve, played in incredible shades of duality by Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren, the latter sporting a long wavy wig and an Irish accent, as Brosnan too taps back into his own Irish background. The couple were given the prompt to make the Harrigans proper Irish on their first day on the set for Season 1, from Ritchie himself. And voilà, they did it.
But before I go any further, I have a bit of an update to share. So we didn’t end up going up to the Cotswolds, which I had dreaded a bit as it’s a two-hour ride from central London, traffic permitting. Instead, the Harrington mansion has been recreated in the historic Ealing Studios, where the history of British cinema was born. Imagine my delight at pulling up to this sign!
Within the newly renovated Ealing Studios was a maverick of production design, the work of Andrew Purcell, along with the series’ supervising art director Ed Turner. Everything about the house we watch on TV is there, except the outside, which is filmed on the grounds of an actual mansion in the Cotswolds. The grand staircase, the noble study of Conrad including those leather armchairs, the beautiful kitchen where so much of Maeve’s mayhem is conceived. It’s all there, inside a studio which makes moving around and filming completely organic. Just to give you an idea of how much so, when I was privy to a recent Hedda screening and Q&A with Nia DaCosta, along with her co-star Tessa Thompson, the American filmmaker pointed to the challenges of filming inside a stately home and admitted that her set designer had to produce a whole new other floor which was added on top of the original antique, just to make sure the historic and protected one didn’t get scratched by the action.
As a friend suggested, I wore black socks to this set visit, in case I needed to take off my shoes “not to scratch the floor.” But thankfully, inside the Ealing Studios recreation, that turned out to be unnecessary and I kept my shoes on.
As part of our outing, we got to ask Mirren and Brosnan questions and mingle with them — the lithe and beautiful actress makes one look forward to growing up! — along with Joanne Froggatt, who plays Jan Da Souza, Lara Pulver who plays Bella Harrington, Mandeep Dhillon, who is Seraphina Harrington in MobLand, Anson Boon — in case you were wondering, who is not at all like his character Eddie Harrigan! — and Teddie Rose Malleson-Allen, who plays Gina Da Souza. Sitting around talking manicures with the ladies felt truly surreal after having watched the series.
Season 2 started filming the first week in November and will be shooting until early spring, for an expected delivery, I imagine, early fall of 2026. Don’t take my professional sentence for complacency to this timing as I’m chomping at the bit to watch season 2! I mean, OMG, between Hardy’s sustained restraint, Mirren’s Shakespearean scheming — although she referred to the action and storyline in MobLand as closer to “Jacobean tragedies” — along with Brosnan’s understated evil, only surpassed by Boon’s outright wickedness and narcissism, season 2 can’t come soon enough.
Perhaps what I love most about MobLand is that is has made me look at my adoptive city, London, in a different way. I now can begin to understand the big cars, the expensive clothing and the jewels I see people flashing in certain areas of central London. Perhaps, not all is what it seems and MobLand has us questioning just who our neighbors are. For that, it has ten stars in my book! Because, remember, all Paramount+ series tend to live in shades of reality…
While I will publish a longer interview piece then, I leave you with a question I asked Mirren and Brosnan, regarding coming away from their characters at night, when wrapping their shoots. It made them think and gave me a way to understand how actors separate their on-screen lives from their real ones. Read on.
I wanted to know, of course this is the kind of dream role that actors think about. But I wanted also to know how you disconnect from these characters because all of that menace and manipulation, you can't really bring home with you. So what was the in and what was the out?
Mirren’s reply: “Oh, I took it home with me, believe me. My husband suffered,” she joked, then added, seriously “neither Pierce or I are the sort of actors who take it home, are we really? But it is an interesting question because I did feel actually, Pierce, this time looking at it, because when we did it last time, it was just doing it, it was just so exciting and a mad rollercoaster ride of work. But coming back to it, I did think oh, that’s actually quite a dark place to go back into. I think at the time we didn’t have time to think of that honestly.” Then added, to conclude “Yeah, I don't wanna get sucked in too deep. So I think we did go deeper than we thought in a way, you know?”
Brosnan’s reply mirrored Mirren’s in a way, as most of his answers did, betraying the duo’s wonderful chemistry: “I don't take it home. You go to work, you open a suitcase and you're in the character, at the end of the day you close the bag and you go home,” then added, “you know, you study, you have to study because these scripts can come in fast and furious and last season we were always catching up.” Yet after Mirren added her doubts at re-encountering Maeve, Brosnan added, “I'm glad you said that 'cause I've been sitting at home the last few weeks thinking oh, I've got to go back in here.”
All images courtesy of Paramount, used with permission