Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of The Westies
Don’t call him the Godfather; Jimmy Roarke hasn’t earned that title yet.
Yes, the Season 1 finale of The Westies, “The Irish Goodbye,” ends with the titular gang’s top enforcer (played by Tom Brittney) pulling off a palace coup that lands his mentor — and true Westies paterfamilias, Eamon Sweeney (J.K. Simmons) — behind bars. And the final shot of the episode, written by showrunners Chris Brancato and Michael Panes, deliberately echoes the ending of Francis Ford Coppola’s beloved 1972 gangster classic, with Jimmy plopping himself down in the seat previously occupied by Sweeney, who is newly prison-bound under the watchful eye of NYPD cop Glenn Keenan (Titus Welliver) and dogged FBI agent Birdie Polk (Jessica Frances Dukes).
But as Brittney himself admits, his alter ego isn’t in the same criminal class as Michael Corleone. “It’s not where he ever saw himself going,” the actor tells Gold Derby. “He thought he’d always be the person on the other side of Sweeney’s desk, and the person in the chair would be his leader.
“I’d spend so many hours with J.K. on the other side of that desk, and that chair really is a throne,” Brittney continues. “So in that last scene, I really played the discomfort that Jimmy feels sitting in it. It also reflected the reality of what I was thinking. I kept going, ‘If J.K. saw me now, he’d be so mad!'”
Panes confirms that Michael Corleone was definitely on his and Brancato’s minds when they wrote the finale. “We had discussed the slow evolution of Jimmy’s character, and how at some point he was going to confront his errant father figure,” the showrunner says. “The Michael Corleone comparison is a very succinct way of symbolizing it. But there’s also enough underpinning that ending where we know it’s going to be a very fraught chair to sit in as opposed to where Michael ended up.”
“Michael ends up really owning the chair,” Brancato emphasizes. “Here, Jimmy might just be borrowing it.”
For the record, Simmons says he doesn’t begrudge Brittney for Jimmy’s actions. And he’s also glad that Sweeney was left alive after Jimmy had the elder gangster in his gun sights in the climactic double-cross. “He wanted a Season 2,” Simmons jokes about why his costar didn’t pull the trigger.
Brittney agrees with that meta answer, but also has an in-universe response ready to go as well. “It’s like he says in the show — it would make him a hypocrite,” the actor muses about Jimmy’s potentially ruinous decision to let Sweeney live. “He says it in a way where he’s tricking Sweeney into thinking he’s going to shoot him, but he’s also spent the whole season insisting that he doesn’t want to spill Irish blood. If he were to do the same thing, it would go completely against his moral code.
“Also, he thinks that sending Sweeney off to prison is a worse fate for what he’s done,” Brittney adds. “Now, Sweeney has to live with the thoughts of his betrayals rather than a quick and easy death.”
Simmons admirers know that the actor has some experience acting behind bars; back in the ’90s, he scored his breakout role on the late, great HBO prison drama, Oz, as Vern Schillinger. Asked how he feels about heading back to jail, the Whiplash Oscar winner takes mock offense. “Do we really have to bring up the past?” Simmons says with the straightest of straight faces. “It’s youthful transgression. Oh, you mean Oz!”
Turning serious — instead of mock-serious — Simmons says that he’s had early discussions with the showrunners about what a Season 2 could look like with Sweeney in lock-up. “They’re a little superstitious about waiting to see [about a renewal], or maybe they just doesn’t want to do a bunch of work that’ll go for naught! But I think there are some really interesting places to go; we did eight episodes with so many complex storylines, and certainly Sweeney is among the characters that will be interesting to see where exactly they are in Season 2 and what position of relative comfort — or discomfort — they’re in.”
Asked if a potential Season 2 of The Westies will double as a stealth Oz prequel, Brancato lights up with a grin. “I don’t think we’re doing to a reprise of Oz; J.K. already did that role,” he says, chuckling. “But we’ve discussed various options for how to deal with Sweeney next season, and the conflict with him and Roarke will continue for sure.”
Panes also confirms that an early exit for Sweeney was never in the cards. “Before we cast J.K., we talked about whether it ends for the character in the finale or not,” he recalls. “But suffice it to say, when you cast J.K. Simmons you don’t ever kill him off too soon.”
Welliver, for one, thinks that no jail will be able to hold Sweeney for very long. “Glenn knows that Sweeney’s going to get out,” the Bosch star says of his alter ego, whose status as a spy in the Westies organization was uncovered in the fifth episode — a twist Gold Derby got to see play out in real time during our visit to The Westies Toronto set.
“They both know this is momentary,” Welliver continues. “That’s one of the reasons that J.K. and I stayed far away from playing that moment between us in the finale as seeming like Glenn’s retribution or payback. There’s really no room for him to relish Sweeney’s arrest. Also Glenn has basically gone there looking for a gunfight. In an odd way, he’s hoping that somebody will go for a gun, because what he ultimately wants to do is kill everybody.”
Even new Godfather on the block Michael Corleone was sage enough to know you’ve got to leave some souls alive for the sequel.
