Stephen Merchant on Honesty and Humor in The Outlaws

We were joined by actor, writer, and creator of Amazon’s The Outlaws, Stephen Merchant to talk about his process in creating the show. Since it had been a divided time when they first created the show with Trump and Brexit, Stephen wanted to create a situation that forced people to work together while being brutally honest with each other. He wanted the characters to snip at each other the way family might. Stephen also talked about elevating the stakes in the second season and seeding ideas in the first season to be used as a jumping off point.

When production shut down during the pandemic, he found himself suddenly being able to plan ahead for the second season and also write for the actors he had already gotten to know the strengths of. It was important to him as a writer not to run away from problems; Stephen wanted to cary that ethos from season one to two where conflicts would come back to haunt the characters. He spoke of having a similar sense of humor with his co-creator while coming from immensely different backgrounds, where the impetus for the show was Stephen imagining what if he had been in a gang growing up rather than the middle class life he actually had.

The challenge of the second season was that they wanted the characters to evolve emotionally after the structure for self discovery in the first season. Having directed three of the episodes, Stephen also wanted Bristol, where he had grown up, to shine as a character and embody the heat and cinematic qualities of a Western. It was an enjoyable challenge for Stephen to bring in genre tricks from both thrillers and action films and tap into that cinematic vocabulary while keeping things grounded and real.

Watch the full conversation below.

Q&A with Stephen Merchant on the Prime Video series The Outlaws. Moderated by Mara Webster, In Creative Company.

Seven strangers from different walks of life forced together to complete a community payback sentence in Bristol.

The Outlaws