Gil Darnell
Gil Darnell plays John (Johnny), the fast-talking member of the four-man London crew whose default response to crisis is to argue his way out. The script puts him in most of the language-gap scenes for a reason: Darnell can sustain dialogue at speed, and the comedy is then a function of how completely that fluency stops working in Vilnius.
Background
Darnell built a profile through London stage and television work, with a regular run of British TV credits in the 2000s and early 2010s. The performance style is verbal — comic timing organised around delivery speed and the choice of which word to hit. That's a useful skill in a film like Redirected because the script needs at least one character who actively talks rather than reacts.
The John performance
John is one of the three original heisters — alongside Tim (Oliver Jackson) and Ben (Antony Strachan) — who is employed by Karl to rob the illegal London poker game and lift Golden Pole's ring. By contrast with Michael, who was kidnapped into the job, John chose this work. He is, structurally, the architect of the social register the crew operates in: the one who talks to strangers, who negotiates with locals, who tries to keep the social plates spinning when everything else fails.
The middle act gives him most of the work. He argues with farmers, with smugglers, with police. The script's running joke is that none of his rhetorical strategies survive the language barrier. A speech that would land in a London pub is met, in Vilnius, with a shrug. The comedy is generated by Darnell's full commitment to the speech and the absolute indifference of the listener.
The scene in the rural police station is the clearest demonstration. John spends almost two minutes constructing a story for an officer who doesn't speak English and who, by the end of the scene, has stopped listening entirely. The shot stays on Darnell. He keeps going. The film keeps not cutting away. The bit works because of his unwillingness to break.
What the ending reveals
Without going into spoilers, John's fate is one of the threads Redirected leaves quietly resolved through the third act. The audience first registers something has happened to him via Michael's discovery in the corrupt officer's house — a small physical object that signals what the script never says out loud. The decision to play John's exit this way, rather than as a confrontation scene, is one of the more interesting structural choices in the closing sequence.
Why this role works
Comedy-thrillers tend to assume the comedy is in plot mechanics — wrong assumptions, mistaken identities, escalating consequences. Redirected uses some of that, but its sharper humour is performance-based, and Darnell is the performance-based instrument. The script needs someone who can talk through a crisis. Without John, the road-movie middle act would slow down to a sequence of confused stares.