The Outlaws revolves around a group of seven very different people brought together by their having broken the law and charged with completing community service, only to find their lives further complicated when they discover a bag of money with ties to the dangerous world of organized crime. The ensemble cast for the series is led by Stephen Merchant, Rhianne Barreto, Christopher Walken, Gamba Cole, Darren Boyd, Clare Perkins and Eleanor Tomlinson.

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In anticipation of the show's premiere, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with co-creator/writer/director/star Stephen Merchant to discuss The Outlaws, his personal inspirations behind the show, its origins as a movie and more.

Screen Rant: So The Outlaws is an absolute blast and is also quite the moving series. How did it come about?

Stephen Merchant: Well, when I was growing up, my parents were involved with the community service world. They supervised people who had broken the law in various ways and were doing 100-200 hours of community service. They would tell me about some of the people that came to the door and it was always an unusual mix. It wasn't who you'd expect.

There was, I remember, an American businessman who would got caught doing a DUI and had to stay in England to do community service. There was a kid I went to school with called Dave who came through several times. Dave was the world's laziest criminal. He once got caught in a house stealing the TV and the homeowners came back and they went, "Dave, what are you doing?" He went, "I'm not Dave." And they went, "Yes you are, you live next door!" He couldn't even go like a block over, he literally was stealing from his next door neighbors.

I just thought what an unusual mix of people, there was like an old guy who would steal vegetables from people's gardens. I just thought what a strange world this is where all these unlikely people would meet and have to work off their hours. I always had that in the back of my head as an idea for a show, so I teamed up with this guy called Elgin James, who's most well known for Mayans MC. He doesn't, on the surface, seem like an obvious collaborator, he's got a very different life story to me. But we had lot in common with our shared sense of humor and we've tried to create something that has sort of drama and humor and a thriller aspect and put all these flavors in that we like that we enjoy.

So what was it like coming up with the look of the series, because it has this really great cinematic feel to it unlike a lot of other TV shows of a similar ilk.

Stephen Merchant: I take that as a huge compliment. We went around the houses, we wrote an original version actually as a film script, which was originally set in LA. But we felt like when it was a movie, there were too many characters and you couldn't explore them all in depth. That's why it seemed to work better as a TV show, but I think we always imagined it with a sort of cinematic edge to it. We like the idea of taking these quite suburban characters, but giving it a bit of a cinematic scale. So like, for instance, the music, if you notice, is very kind of Sergio Leone-influence kind of Western, even the title of the show, The Outlaws.

We like the idea that in a movie that would be kind of seven magnificent cowboys on horseback riding across a desert plane. In this case, it's just seven suburban people wearing Hi-Vis tabards. We liked the idea of trying to approach that and give it something epic, even though their lives are very small, so we tried to approach it cinematically and give it some scale and some sheen. Also I think Bristol, where we set it and is my hometown, is a very visual city, it's full of color, there's a lot of street art, it's very hilly, so there's a lot of depth and a lot of scale. I think it has a lot of visual flavor to it.

You mentioned the scale of the series, I know that you already have a second season in the works. Since this did, as you mentioned, start as a film, did the idea for the second season come up when it was a film or during the writing of season one or during the shooting?

Stephen Merchant: Well, we started shooting and then about 10 days into filming, we had to go into lockdown because of that first COVID outbreak. I kind of get bored quickly and I sort of said to Amazon and the BBC, "Look, can I write another season while we're in lockdown?" And miraculously, they said yes, so when we came back, we did two series back-to-back. It allowed us to sort of rewrite series 1 to accommodate series 2, which often you don't get the opportunity to do, so we could plant seeds that we could pay off later. We've managed to map out an arc of 12 episodes that hopefully takes you somewhere when you end up at the end of those 12.

Cast of The Outlaws

I don't think you'll quite know how you got there, hopefully from the beginning, but also, as you mentioned about the cinematic thing, one of the things for me was being able to throw in little nods to movies that I love. So we know we have a little kind of heist, in each of the seasons. I love those heist movies, Ocean's Eleven and things like that, so there's a little sort of suburban version of a heist in there and a home invasion, kind of like the first Halloween movie of Michael Myers stalking around the house, we sort of throw a bit of that in there. So it's nice, I think, to take those genre conventions and throw them into this provincial time that you wouldn't normally expect to see that stuff. So that's been a lot of fun.

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The Outlaws is now streaming on Prime Video.