Gangs of London's Richard Dormer: ‘Not being one of the sheeple cost me a lot of jobs'

Telegraph

20-03-2025

When Richard Dormer was offered his latest role, the bandit Cornelius Quinn in the third series of Sky Atlantic's uber-violent Gangs of London, he laid down one condition. He wanted his fearsome villain to forgo a gun in favour of wielding a blackthorn stick.
It not only, alongside his flat cap, perfected his silhouette – a Dormer prerequisite for an indelible character ('I always like to have a shape, angles or whatever it is') – it also allowed him to reference a slice of Irish history.
'In the 1800s, a lot of young men went to fight with these shillelaghs or blackthorn sticks because they weren't allowed guns under the British occupation,' he explains on a video call from his new house in the east of Belfast. 'They all developed limps so they had an excuse to have this thing. The bulb at the end of the stick is made from the root of the blackthorn and it's a lethal weapon. They can crack concrete.
'I find it fascinating that the human being will always find a way to fight back. So I think the stick is a symbol of rebellion and ancestry,' says the actor, who has mixed theatre and 20 plays for Radio 4 with film and top-flight TV. He brandished a flaming sword as warrior Beric Dondarrion in Game of Thrones and flourished a snooker cue in his breakout role as Northern Irish world champion Alex Higgins in his self-penned play Hurricane.
Quinn and the rest of his gang 'are very aware of their Irishness,' says Dormer, 'but they don't celebrate it openly because there was always a sense of if you were Irish, north or south, you were like a second-class citizen when you were in England.' It sounds like this is the perfect metaphor for the 55-year-old's life story – moving from his native Northern Ireland to London to take up a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
'Yeah,' he nods. 'I had a hard time as a young actor because every time I opened my mouth, people would just go, 'Oh, he's Irish – we're doing Shakespeare'. We were looked down upon because we didn't speak with marbles in our mouths. So yeah, I think that's where it came from,' he says with a chuckle. 'I'm discovering a lot today.'
An interview can indeed sometimes feel like a therapy session. But Dormer often gets on to a literal therapist's couch at the end of a job.
'Only with things that touch the psyche,' he explains. Did this job reach that threshold? 'Yes,' he says softly. 'Because there was a funeral sequence and I had to p--s on a grave. I felt very out of myself doing it because of what was happening – my mum died only three days before that. It was just like, 'What am I doing? This is bleak, this is dark.' You don't realise it's affecting you until you get home and two days later you break down making a cup of tea and you've got all these violent images in your head.'
He takes a deep breath. 'You mine these deep wells in yourself and all this stuff comes bubbling out. You've got to wrestle it and recognise that it's just your brain trying to process the almost unnatural act of acting.'
As a viewer, Dormer normally shies away from on-screen bloodshed. But after bingeing the first two series of the show – about the battles between fiefdoms including the Albanian mafia, a Pakistani drug cartel and the Kurdish PKK – he was captivated by the 'ugly beauty. My heart was just thumping in my chest watching it and I thought, 'I want to be part of this – this crazy balletic dance of violence'.'
Cornelius is introduced in similar fashion – in the fairground of a travelling circus before pandemonium is wreaked, amid a sea of C-words, inside a house of mirrors.
Dormer, who is divorced and single, lets slip that he expects to make a small appearance in the next season, but at his age is not keen on being stuck in long-running shows. He cites 2023 BBC police procedural Blue Lights: 'I was delighted that the character Gerry got killed off because it meant I could do Day of the Jackal', playing gunsmith Norman Stoke opposite Eddie Redmayne in another Sky production.
'I want to be able to jump from one thing to the other, unless it's the lead part, in which case you really get to develop. But if you're a supporting character, there's a lot of waiting around. I just like to keep active and chameleon-like.'
The new series of Gangs raises the question of drug legalisation as one route to do away with the crime syndicates. It is a prospect Dormer supports. 'It could be regulated and legalised and that wouldn't encourage people to take drugs but I think it would save a lot of lives. It's a real disease at the heart of modern society. If we only accepted there's a lot of people dying, rather than turning our backs and pretending it doesn't exist. Because it's around every corner and behind every bin – there's some poor soul who's just jacked up using a bad needle.'
Dormer saw this first-hand on the streets of Belfast just days before we speak, doing his first shift as ambassador for the city's SOS NI charity. 'It's one of the best choices I've made in my later life. It was profound. Within an hour, we found a guy who was about to die of hypothermia and who was overdosed on heroin lying under some tarpaulin. Five minutes later and…' Dormer points out that a key problem is users are buying all sorts of new formulations. 'They're taking pink cocaine or whatever,' he says of a cocktail of illegal substances. It is echoed in the driving plot of the new series, the spiking of a batch of one gang's coke with fentanyl, killing hundreds of Londoners.
Dormer's drug of choice is nicotine, and he appears to be burning through most of his daily pack in this one sitting. 'I always want to smoke when I'm doing these interviews,' he admits, the careful art of puffing giving smokers 'an advantage. They have an extra five seconds to compose an answer.'
As a working-class teenager, Dormer's brooding intensity saw him accepted to not one but four of London's top drama schools. However, he is still marked by the Rada dialect classes in which the teacher used him as a model for how not to speak. 'Okay, so my accent, it's funny. Is that all it is? What about the culture behind my accent? What about the hundreds of years of history?'
He was perfectly capable of doing RP for a part, but refused to. 'I know it cost me a lot of jobs not being one of the sheeple, or kowtowing, but it was the kind of Cornelius Quinn – the rebel who was sticking his fingers up.'
Elocution styles may have changed – 'Now they have Northern Irish people on Radio 4, reading the weather' – but Dormer believes that access to drama schools has gone in reverse. 'It's like 100 grand or something,' he bemoans. 'That's why there's no classically trained working-class actors any more.'
Another thing that is increasingly unaffordable is Oscar-winning thesps. We are talking the day after the LA ceremony, but Dormer says he long ago jettisoned any wish to swap his flaming sword or fighting stick for a gold statuette.
'I just see that it's all nonsense, backslapping and cliquey. And does it really do your career any good? You're priced out of the market as soon as you get that symbol. It means that your wage is sky-high and people can't afford you, it's crazy.' But you are still reasonably priced, I check. 'I am affordable!' he confirms with a deep throaty laugh. 'I am up for work. I'll take it.'
Gangs of London season three begins on Sky Atlantic on Thursday 20 March at 9pm; streaming as a boxset on NOW