Inside the crazy way set designers made all the fake weed used in The Gentlemen

If you’ve been watching The Gentlemen on Netflix right now and swooning over Theo James in the process, you’ve obviously noticed that the set has A LOT of weed, naturally. And given the fact that it’s an illegal drug in the UK, you were probably wondering whether it was real or not and, if so, what they used instead, right?

Well, given that it’s a Guy Ritchie show and the fact that they featured over £8 million worth of watches ALONE, The Gentleman had a big budget to play around with and speaking to Variety, production designer for the show Martyn John shared how they created the weed empire for filming.

So, did they use real weed in The Gentlemen?

Via Instagram

So whilst the cannabis used in filming wasn’t real, the producers originally had the chance to legally buy and use hemp which is a plant in the “botanical class of Cannabis sativa cultivars”. It’s basically weed that contains less than 0.3 per cent of THC content. And because of the low THC level, hemp doesn’t really get you high and therefore is technically legal if it contains less than 0.2 per cent THC.

But they decided against this because it was really impractical for filming: “But you can’t move [hemp]. Every time you move it from the studio to say the back of a lorry, you need a license, so we didn’t do that,” Martyn said. This means that they couldn’t use it for any of the filming on location.

What is the fake weed made of in The Gentlemen?

Via Netflix

So instead of the hemp they used silk. Yes SILK. Producers had cannabis leaves printed on silk in China and they look insanely realistic. “We imported them and made the weed plants in various stages of growth. And I 3D printed seed heads to stick on the weed plants,”Martyn said. They did this over and over to create the masses of cannabis needed to portray the farm under Eddie’s estate.

Not even the weed being boujee and made of silk in this show!

The Gentleman is available to watch on Netflix now. For more like this The Gentleman weed explainer and all the latest Netflix drops and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook.

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Featured image via Netflix and Instagram.