Merchant himself stars in the show alongside Rhianne Barreto, Darren Boyd, Gamba Cole, Clare Perkins, Eleanor Tomlinson and Christopher Walken as the misfit convicts. We sat down with him to chat about British humor, comic book movies, and Christopher Walken’s cooking. Where did the idea for The Outlaws come from? Were you concerned about how US audiences would react to the Britishness of the show? I think my concern is if you start to iron out the specificity and you don’t make any cultural references to specifically British things, I think it starts to exist in a no man’s land that’s not quite America or England. I mean even from the original version of The Office, yes, all right, it had a small audience in America, but it had enough of an audience that when they talked about remaking it, there were opinion pieces and actors and producers who wouldn’t go near it in Hollywood, because they’re like, “We’re not going to damage the original, we loved it so much.” I think my worry is if you start to try and make it too general, people can smell it. It’s like somehow it loses authenticity. Even going back to the British version of The Office people didn’t know where Slough was and they never worked in a paper factory, but it felt familiar enough. How did Christopher Walken come on board? Even in the earliest versions of it, we always liked the idea that there was this American doing community service amongst the Brits and he felt alien, like a “man who fell to earth.” And then you reveal that he’s as small and petty and a nobody like everybody else, but someone that could add a swagger and a kind of charisma. There are only certain people of a certain vintage who felt right for that and brought the charisma and were exciting as a proposition, and Walken was top of that list. Did he sign up straight away? You’ve already shot season two—will this next season up the ante? We’ve tried to do, I think, what a lot of those American shows do very effectively is you chase your characters up a tree and then you just start throwing stones at them. And then you pick up rocks for series two and throw rocks at them. And by series four, you’re machine-gunning at them up the tree, and I think it’s just turning the heat up all the time. We’ve tried to do that with series two, like just turn the screw on all these characters, all of the plates you’ve got spinning in series one, let’s just dial it up now for series two. You’ve also been in some massive blockbusters, including Logan. What’s your relationship to comic book movies? Well, when I was a kid, I was actually in the Bristol Evening Post for my comic collection. I was at comic fairs a lot and they interviewed me. The idea of even being part of one of those seemed exciting to me because I loved the fact that it was Wolverine’s last stand. I was very thrilled to be involved with it. There was an audition process and they don’t tell you what character you’re playing or what the name of the film is or anything, so you’re just slightly going in blind. I think they might have said, “Are you willing to shave your head?” I think that was the only clue I had. I love the fact that I exist in that universe. I’d quite like to be brought back at some point. I could be in a prequel. They can bring people back, right? They can always bring a character back?
