The rivalry we never knew we needed between Matthew McConaughey and Henry Golding is upon us, and it looks seriously fun. A new trailer for Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen has just dropped, promising a romp around Europe, crimes by inept criminals, and thinly-veiled parables from McConaughey.
The film — which was previously titled Toff Guys — stars McConaughey as Mickey Pearson, a man who has created a drug empire in London and now wants out. Henry Golding plays a Vietnamese gangster named “Dry Eye,” who, from the look of the trailer, seemingly wants in on Mickey’s profitable business. At least, that’s what it seems like, from the morality tale that Mickey spews.
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“There once was a young and foolish dragon who came to ask a wise and cunning lion about acquiring his territory. The lion, he wasn’t interested,” Mickey says in the trailer while cleaning a gun in front of Golding’s Dry Eye.
“The dragon, he persisted. So the lion took the little dragon for a walk, and put five bullets in the little dragon’s head. There’s a message in there, maybe you can explain it to me,” Mickey muses.
Mickey’s story is intercut with shots of flying bullets, car crashes, and one dead body wrapped in plastic. Charlie Hunnam, Michelle Dockery, and Succession star Jeremy Strong make an appearance, as does Colin Farrell, who reportedly plays “Coach,” a man who trains MMA fighters.
We may love Golding and McConaughey's bitter spat on film, but Golding wasn't so thrilled to realise that his co-star stayed in character behind-the-scenes.
"He just looks at me with this killer stare and he's like, 'I'm McConaughey,'" Golding explained on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon of his first interaction with his co-star. "No one told me that he stays in character and our characters hate each other, so I thought he hated me and my world just imploded."
The Gentleman is worlds away from Ritchie’s last film, which was the big screen adaptation of Aladdin. Prior to that, the director helmed Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes films as well as 2017’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, which also starred Hunnam. The Gentlemen seems to be most inline Ritchie’s 2000 film Snatch, a London-set crime drama with an ensemble cast that became one of the first films to put him on Hollywood’s radar.
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Check out the trailer below:
The Gentlemen hits cinemas 1 January 2020.