Daniel Ings Exits The Gentlemen Ahead of Season Three

Daniel Ings will not return as Freddy Horniman when Netflix's crime drama The Gentlemen continues into its third season, the actor confirmed in an interview with HATC Magazine published on October 19. Ings said he considers the character's ending a satisfying conclusion after two seasons of portraying the troubled aristocrat alongside Theo James.

The confirmation follows the announcement of a third season for the series created by Guy Ritchie. Freddy's departure marks a change for the show's central family dynamic, which has featured the character's repeated missteps and his complicated relationship with his younger brother, Eddie Horniman.

Discussing his future with the series, Ings described Freddy's fate as a form of closure rather than an unfinished storyline.

"I'm not in the next one. So that's a fun sense of closure. I kind of see it as closure for the character in a way; it just ends as this wild, broken, crazy, you know. I don't know, probably mumbling into the ether somewhere in the British countryside," Ings said.

The actor also reflected on how Freddy changed between the first and second seasons. According to Ings, Ritchie wanted to move away from the character's more exaggerated comedic behavior and introduce a different dramatic direction when production on the second season began.

"It was a lot of fun. Really, it was a great experience. I'll always be grateful to have played a part in creating that character.

I absolutely loved playing Freddy. When that storyline was presented to me for series two, he was written almost as a completely different character. And part of that was that I think Guy wanted to move away from the humour of it.

He sat me down on my first day on the second series and was like, we went too far with the humour; we got to pull it back. So that was part of it was really interesting to kind of thread that needle," Ings said.

Ings explained that Ritchie's production style also required the cast to adapt to frequent script changes. Scenes could be revised shortly before filming, while performers were encouraged to improvise and contribute to the development of their characters.

"In a way, that character really went on a big old journey, and the way that Guy Ritchie works is that he kind of throws the script out on the morning, and so you're really putting a lot of yourselves as performers into those characters and helping build the momentum of a scene, ad-libbing and improvising and all this kind of stuff. Or he'll rewrite the script and give you brand new pages," Ings said.

Those changes presented an additional challenge as different directors took charge of episodes and the story developed. Ings said he and James had to maintain the progression of the brothers' conflict while working with evolving scripts.

"So that was a constant sort of evolution of surprise because you couldn't even really rely on the scripts that you were given. They came in sort of two at a time. So we shot the first two episodes of series one with Guy, and then new directors would come in. We'd get these new drafts, and that was a sort of constantly evolving process, and it was a real challenge to find the through-lines with the characters, and particularly for me and Theo, who plays the lead in it, we had this kind of dynamic of a brotherly conflict that we had to really track through all of these evolving plotlines and storylines, and we learned a huge amount," Ings said.

The actor said he welcomed the opportunity to take Freddy in a different direction rather than repeat the same comedic mistakes throughout the series.

"It was a fun way to kind of cap off the character. You don't want to keep playing the same game with the audience of this guy kind of comedically messing things up for them. So it was an interesting challenge to take him in a different direction at the end. I thought it was fun," Ings said.

In a separate anecdote shared with Digital Spy, Ings recalled asking to keep Freddy's chicken costume, associated with a memorable scene in the series' first episode. The production initially allowed him to take it home, but contacted him about a week later to say the decision had been a mistake.

"I asked for it on my very last day, and they said yes", he recalled. "I took it home with me, and about a week later, they called and said, 'Oh my God, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have given you that.'"

Ings also joked about losing access to the costume for Halloween and acknowledged that it had occupied considerable wardrobe space. The Gentlemen is available to stream on Netflix, with its third season confirmed.