‘Mayor of Kingstown’ Star’s New Series Is Perfect for Taylor Sheridan Fans

The streaming service MGM+ is set to add another compelling drama to its lineup with The Westies, premiering on July 12. The show centers around the construction of the Jacob Javits Convention Center, which is being built on the Westies’ home turf in Hell’s Kitchen. With the promise of a financial windfall for the Irish-American crime gang, the Westies manage to keep their standing among other crime families with their sheer brutality, despite being outnumbered. Despite a fragile treaty that facilitates the sharing of spoils, internal conflict between the older Westie leadership and the more uninhibited younger generation threatens to upend everything.

Led by Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons as the gang’s leader, Eamon Sweeney, The Westies is an 8-episode series brimming with intensity and ruthlessness, which explores the Italian Mafia in an interesting new way. Simmons’ character has plenty to contend with, not the least of which is John Gotti, played by Hamish Allan-Headley, who is associated with the Gambino crime family. Gotti is an interesting real-life figure whose infamy as the eventual leader of the Gambino crime family has been the focus of other movie and television projects.

However, The Westies Season 1 will showcase Gotti before his rise to power, highlighting an interesting dynamic with Simmons’ character in the crime drama. MovieWeb had a chance to sit down with Hamish Allan-Headley and talk about bringing Gotti to life. The actor is best known for his role as a corrupt police officer in Daredevil: Born Again. When MovieWeb asked Allan-Headley if he was excited about breaking out from the cop character typecast and transitioning into the role of a gangster, he explained how playing Gotti led to a very different type of performance:

“Oh man, well, yeah, yeah I am. But also, just this particular role is so fun, right? You know, the one thing that I read about John Gotti was that he just loved being a gangster, so playing somebody like that is really exciting.”

Another character Hamish Allan-Headley is known for playing is SWAT leader Robert Sawyer in the Taylor Sheridan-created series Mayor of Kingstown. As it turns out, the actor found plenty of thematic similarities between the Paramount+ show and his upcoming crime drama. While The Westies hasn’t been released yet, it’s clear the show will explore similar themes of moral ambiguity and corruption prominent in many of Sheridan’s works. As Allan-Headley told MovieWeb:

“I think it deals with, like, a lot of Taylor’s themes, and themes in this are you know, family and loyalty, and yeah, so I think there’s a lot of sort of, and Taylor sort of has these archetypes that run through his series, and you’ll see a lot of those in here as well, brothers, all that sort of stuff.”

It will be interesting to see how much thematic overlap there is between the shows. Taylor Sheridan’s massive success on streaming and broadcast television has led many other projects to try to emulate his style of episodic storytelling. Hopefully, The Westies can take full advantage of its rich historical context and stacked cast to deliver an enthralling show that is comparable to, if not better than, Mayor of Kingstown or other similar series.