Hamish Allan-Headley Breaks Down Young John Gotti’s Ruthless Rise to Power

MGM+’s The Westies follows the notorious Irish-American from Hell’s Kitchen as they set their sights on the lucrative construction of New York City’s Jacob Javits Convention Center. The series explores the uneasy alliance between the Westies and the far more powerful Gambino crime family as the fragile truce between the Irish and the Italian Mafia slowly unravels.

In the series, John Gotti, played by Hamish Allan-Headley, is portrayed as an ambitious and increasingly influential captain within the Gambino crime family who sees the Irish as a hindrance to his own ambition. Although Gambino boss Paul “Big Paul” Castellano (Ron Lea) initially honors the truce with Eamon Sweeney (J.K. Simmons) and the Westies, Gotti repeatedly challenges that arrangement, as well as Paulie, in hopes of making money in the lucrative drug trade that Paulie wants part of.

Throughout the series, Gotti becomes one of Sweeney’s most dangerous adversaries. He grows suspicious after a Gambino soldier disappears, personally interrogates those connected to the case, has Mickey Flanagan (Stanley Morgan) kidnapped and tortured for answers, and repeatedly pressures Castellano to let him take control of the Javits operation. His growing involvement in drug trafficking also creates friction with Castellano, who views Gotti’s ambitions as reckless.

By Episode 5, Paulie must order Gotti to play nice with Sweeney, warning the future mob boss not to touch Sweeney’s crew. During a drug deal, Jimmy (Tom Brittney) is almost killed by Gotti’s men, but the hit goes wrong, leaving Jimmy with the drugs AND the money. After having the pair grabbed off the street, Gotti offers them “a future or an early grave” if they join him. Jimmy refuses to betray Sweeney, but Gotti remains convinced they’ll eventually come around.

With Gotti’s ambition on full display, Hamish Allan-Headley chats with TV Insider to break down the future mob boss’s calculated restraint, his vision for the Mafia’s future, and the parallels between Gotti and Jimmy. Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Westies Episode 5.

With a real-life figure like John Gotti, audiences come in with an image already formed: The suits, the swagger, the celebrity gangster he will eventually become. But this is Gotti before he becomes “The John Gotti.” What part of him did you want to strip back or rediscover?

Hamish Allan-Headley: This show is based in fact, based on real people and real relationships, but is actually historical fiction, as opposed to a biopic. So we got to decide what part of this character of John Gotti we wanted to focus on, free of having to recreate the actual circumstances of his life. Which was great for us because we got to imagine what his career was like when he was on the rise, before he became the American icon we remember from the tabloids.

What we focused on in terms of our Gotti character is showing his relentless, unbridled ambition. And ambition in a way is synonymous with New York City. When people think of New York, one thing they think of is ambition, and John Gotti personified that for many of us, and we get to see that ambition in motion in this series.

What did you learn about Gotti that you didn’t know before taking the role?

A lot of his contemporaries talk about how much he loved being a gangster. How much he loved the game of it. Being around his guys. And how funny he was. Not something you necessarily connect with people in organized crime.

In Episode 5, Gotti takes a hit from Sweeney’s side, but he doesn’t immediately retaliate because he knows he has to go through Paulie. What does that restraint tell us about Gotti at this point in his rise?

It tells us that he is not at the pinnacle of his power, that he is still on the way up. I think it also tells us a lot about how the Italian organisation worked. The mafia seemed to have a lot of rules and a very strict order of government. Which worked well for them. They were the most successful criminal organisation in the world at that time, so obviously, the structure they created worked very well for their purposes. I think it shows that even John Gotti had to respect that system and try to work within its rules.

In Episode 5, Jimmy and Mickey also refuse to sell for him, but Gotti seems convinced they’ll eventually come back. What does Gotti see happening inside the Westies that Jimmy and Mickey perhaps don’t see yet?

He sees that Jimmy is a smart guy with a mind for making money. And I think he recognises that Jimmy is in the same situation he is, having an overbearing, unreasonable, outdated, out-of-touch boss, and that they could have a mutually beneficial relationship. And he knows that Jimmy will come around to his point of view at some point.

Brooke Palmer / ©MGM+ / Courtesy Everett Collection

There’s an interesting game happening where Paulie has prevented Gotti from attacking Sweeney directly, so Gotti starts maneuvering around him instead. Is Episode 5 where we really begin to see Gotti becoming a political operator rather than simply a dangerous guy?

I think that’s fair to say. Gotti, in this show, and probably in real life too, is a very strong-willed person and a strategic thinker. He sees the obstacle that Castellano is putting up and finds a way around it. I think at this point in our trajectory for Gotti, he has enough power to make moves but not yet enough power for an all-out coup, so he’s forced to play chess.

Gotti keeps pushing against Castellano’s authority, particularly when it comes to the drug trade. How much of what we’re seeing is ambition, and how much is Gotti genuinely believing that Castellano’s way of doing business is becoming obsolete?

That’s a good question. The path that we chose is that Gotti believes himself to be the smartest man in the room, and most of the time he is. He sees that the current leadership, Castellano, is out of date and leaving money on the table by not selling drugs. Leaving this money on the table allows for other organisations to get richer and to form a stronger power base. So it’s a matter of survival. The game is changing. He believes he is the man to lead them into the future. Would he have made this move if Castellano had been a better leader? I don’t know.

Paul Castellano wants stability because there are millions to be made from the Javits Center, while Gotti seems much more willing to risk that stability. Does Gotti think he understands where organized crime is headed better than Paul does?

Absolutely. Gotti sees Castellano as a white-collar guy. Not a street guy.

Jimmy is essentially attempting to accomplish the same thing Gotti has been trying to do on his own side — push out the old boss and take control. Do you see Gotti and Jimmy as distorted reflections of each other?

I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, absolutely. Gotti’s point of view is that Jimmy is naive. Gotti understands the game better than Jimmy. In Episode 5, Gotti says to Jimmy something like, “All bosses are snakes. You don’t know that?” And I’m not sure Jimmy really does know that. The only difference between them seems to be that Jimmy is entering the big leagues and Gotti has been playing there for a while.

Brooke Palmer / ©MGM+ / Courtesy Everett Collection

As the series progresses, what did you most enjoy revealing about Gotti that isn’t apparent when we first meet him?

I think things fell into place for me when I realised how much Gotti enjoyed his work. He loves this high-stakes game. So that permitted me to really have fun with my scenes, even when Gotti is pissed off, and things aren’t going his way; the thrill of the game is always there for him.

If you had to pinpoint the scene where the Gotti we meet at the beginning of the series becomes the Gotti we know from history, which scene would you choose?

It’s funny because the Gotti we know from history is what we saw in the paper or watched on the news. He never deliberately revealed any of himself to the public. He never gave interviews or did any public speaking or anything like that. So a lot of what we think about him we have made up. Like so many celebrities during that time, they could be whatever we wanted them to be. We projected ourselves onto them.

The same is true for Gotti. Many New Yorkers saw a guy who lived out in Queens, born in the Bronx in extremely difficult, very poor, hard conditions, with a lot of brothers and sisters, and rose out of that poverty to become, essentially, the king of New York. People love a story like that. It’s a deeply American story and a quintessentially New York story. The rags-to-riches. In our show, we get to see how that guy became king. And I think you really start to see it around Episode 3 when he visits Castellano, and Castellano says to Gotti, in regard to selling drugs, that “We must stay out of the gutter,” and Gotti’s response is, “I’m from the gutter, Paul. Most of us are.” I think that was my favorite line I got to say in the show. Because it really encapsulates the relationship between him and Castellano and speaks volumes about who our version of John Gotti is.

The Westies, Sundays, 9/8c, MGM+