Chris McPherson

Published Jul 17, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT

Chris is a Senior News Writer for Collider. He can be found in an IMAX screen, with his eyes watering and his ears bleeding for his own pleasure. He joined the news team in 2022 and accidentally fell upwards into a senior position despite his best efforts.

For reasons unknown, he enjoys analyzing box office receipts, giant sharks, and has become known as the go-to man for all things Bosch, Mission: Impossible and Christopher Nolan in Collider’s news division. Recently, he found himself yeehawing along to the Dutton saga on the Yellowstone Ranch.

He is proficient in sarcasm, wit, Photoshop and working unfeasibly long hours. Amongst his passions sit the likes of the history of the Walt Disney Company, the construction of theme parks, steam trains and binge-watching Gilmore Girls with a coffee that is just hot enough to scald him.

His obsession with the Apple TV+ series Silo is the subject of mockery within the Senior News channel, where his feelings about Taylor Sheridan’s work are enough to make his fellow writers roll their eyes.

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When you’re making a fictional television series based around real events, a real time period, real individuals who did very real, very illegal things, you have a very thin line that you need to tiptoe across to make it work. Stick too rigidly to the historical record, and the characters can begin to feel trapped by events viewers already know about, but if you wander too far from it, it becomes something entirely made up. Thankfully, for us as viewers, MGM+’s The Westies has found room somewhere in the middle.

Although Stanley Morgan’s Mickey Flanagan and Tom Brittney’s Jimmy Roarke share their first names with two of the real gang’s most infamous figures, Morgan stresses that the series is not attempting to dramatize the lives of Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan directly. Instead, the colorful history of those real-life figures, along with those who occupied Hell’s Kitchen around that time, serves as a jumping-off point for the actors. Speaking exclusively with Collider, Morgan explained, “I don’t think it is a direct retelling of what went on. I think our story, Jimmy and Mickey, although they might share names with real people, have a very different relationship.” He continued, saying:

“In our story, these are two men who have known each other since they were children, which is different to the stories you’re talking about. But what I do think is that the raw materials that made up these people that you’ve read about are what make up our story as well — the essences of different stories and people who existed at this time. But it’s definitely not a biographical retelling of that story in particular. Of course, I read about those stories, and I read about lots of other stories in preparation, and I do think there are lots of those stories in the work of the actors in this.”

Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. This is the universe your temperament, your survival instincts, and your particular brand of stubbornness were made for.

You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You’re a systems thinker who can’t help but notice the seams in things.

The wasteland doesn’t reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That’s you.

You’d survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely.

Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards.

The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Coonan and Featherstone were two of the most important figures in the history of the Westies as an organization. While the series depicts both adapted characters at the start of their rise to power, the real story goes much further. Coonan emerged as the gang’s leader, while Featherstone became one of his most notorious enforcers and eventual second-in-command, a dynamic that you can already see building in the initial episodes of the series.

Their partnership did not end with the childhood loyalty depicted between Jimmy and Mickey in the MGM+ series, though. The pair eventually fell out, in part over the gang’s relationship with the Gambino crime family. After Featherstone was wrongly convicted of the 1985 murder of construction worker Michael Holly, he became a government informant. His cooperation and testimony helped prosecutors dismantle the organisation, while Coonan was ultimately convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 75 years in prison.

While those events may not be getting recreated beat for beat, Morgan said researching the real people and their experiences helped give the fictional world its weight, and that authenticity was strengthened by the level of detail he encountered when he stepped onto the production’s sets. “I did, yeah. I did at times,” Morgan said when asked whether the environment made him feel as though he had entered 1980s New York. “There were many times where I felt that. I think that’s everything I’m looking for as an actor, to feel that feeling and to feel like these are real experiences that are happening right now.” Mogan went on to praise the crew of the series, saying:

“And I think you get that when you work with the level of craftsmanship across the board on a production, and we really had that. I just remember all of the detail provided by the art department and the set decorators, right down to tiny little props that you would work with in a scene. Everything was thought about and looked into, and it just keeps you in that world. It keeps inspiring you and hitting you and making you really feel like you’re in that time and place.”

The Westies is streaming on MGM+ with new episodes on Sundays. Stay tuned at Collider for more.

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