Finn Cole tells what Helen McCrory taught him
Andrew Billen | The Times | February 19, 2022
The final series of Peaky Blinders, Stephen Knight’s operatic celebration of Birmingham gangsters, is upon us. As ever, the Shelbys, the fantastically dysfunctional family entrusted with organising the city’s crime between the wars, will generate a frenzy of interwoven subplots. In essence, however, the saga will resolve into a power struggle — not, obviously, between good and evil or even between bad and worse, but between the old and the new.
On one side is Peaky’s perennial star turn, Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby. Tommy is cunning, clever and ruthless — but also superstitious, ravaged by drink, haunted by his dead wife, outwitted in the previous series by Oswald Mosley and, as a good/bad Catholic, distractedly chasing the impossibility of absolution.
On the other is his cousin, Michael Gray, 13 years his junior, educated, dead-eyed, as lethal with an accountant’s pen as a razor blade and heavy with ambition to transform the Shelby operation from a provincial assassins’ club into a global opium-trader. Finn Cole, the 26-year-old Londoner who has played Michael since series two, puts it plainly: the omnipotent Tommy has noticed his energy and is intimidated.
Indeed, Michael’s mother, “Aunt” Polly Gray, has already forecast a war between them: “And one of you will die, but which one I cannot tell.” Since Polly, the series’ gypsy princess, merits a four-out-of-five tip advisor rating for fortune telling, I ask Cole whether he had read that line in the script with a certain chill.
“Of course, of course, naturally. When Steve [Knight] writes something like that we all know that there must be some truth to it,” Cole says over Zoom from his home in London, adding, however, that no death of a regular character in Peaky Blinders is gratuitous. “I feel that when my time comes on this show — if my time comes — it will be for the right reasons.”
What no one predicted was that between the transmission of series five and the shooting of series six Helen McCrory, who played Aunt Polly, would fall terminally ill. When shooting resumed, the cast was simply told that McCrory was unavailable for the new series. The terrible news broke afterwards. In April last year, aged 52, she died of breast cancer.
“I assumed that something was up. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t feel it was my place. We had to get on with what we’re told to do. And we did. And it was tough.
“There was definitely a lot of energy still in our performances from having her in mind. Her energy lived throughout and as far as I’m concerned that energy will never die for any of the actors who got to work with her and experience that level of talent.”
Cole had acted with the National Youth Theatre and put on plays in Edinburgh, but his first television scene was with McCrory on Peaky Blinders. “I learnt more in that two hours of filming than I did in the six, seven, eight years I’d been doing it. And she continued to teach me those lessons and continued to be that model. I could ask questions about acting, but I could chat to her about absolutely anything in the world.”
I recall the electrifying scene in the previous series when Michael, having lost millions for the Shelbys in the Great Crash, returns from America to receive the most hostile of welcomes from Polly. The confrontation was savage, yet heavy with the lost love between mother and son.
“Helen was capable of pulling off anything that she wanted to. Something that I learnt from her was that she could get other actors to act the way that she wanted just by her performance. And that’s not something that’s easy to do, especially with stubborn actors who don’t like to pay attention to what’s going on in the room. It was virtually impossible not to pay attention to her performance because it was so full of energy and so interesting. She would get you to perform in a completely different way. She would have you in the palm of her hand, just like Polly.”
The new series begins in 1933 four years on from the previous one and — a caption informs us — from Polly’s funeral. Michael has grown a moustache — and in authority. Almost immediately he and Tommy clash. They are both ruthless mobsters, of course, but we discuss their differences.
One is this: Tommy, Arthur and Johnny — the Shelby brothers — had fought in the First World War. Michael, 11 when it started, did not. A visual signifier of this is that Michael does not share the brothers’ peaky haircut. Razoring the scalp to ear level began in the trenches to deter lice (thanks to Peaky Blinders, a century on it became the must-have cut for millions of young Britons). Whereas Tommy dresses as he thinks a member of the establishment should, there is an American swagger to Michael’s suits. Perhaps also, because he is not fighting demons from the trenches, Michael is not in the same thrall to drink and narcotics as his cousins.
This is not to say that Michael has not experienced trauma. His alcoholic father died in an accident when he was five, leaving Michael to be taken from Polly by the police and brought up by a foster family. Along the way, he was sexually abused by a priest. He returned to the Shelby/Gray family aged 19, yet how attached to them is he really?
“It’s something that we’ve touched on a lot throughout the series. He’s definitely desensitised. He lacks empathy in many ways because of his upbringing and because his first memories are of Polly drunk and being taken away from her and then going to this new family that aren’t blood relatives. It’s made him quite enigmatic. He can detach himself from responsibility and love and care in a way that some of the other characters can’t — and to their detriment.” Which makes him all the more scary? “I think anyone in that position is scary. They’re impossible to read.”
One can see how Michael’s conflicts, generational and familial, with the Shelbys might work on paper. You have to watch the series to see how Cole energises them in practice. Finn was 18 when his elder brother, Joe Cole, tipped him off that Peaky Blinders was casting for its second series. Joe, seven years older than Finn, was already established in the series as the younger Shelby brother, John (he was written out in series four in a typically violent manner, but Finn says there was too great an age gap for any professional resentment). Open casting auditions were held in Birmingham in January 2014, but Finn could not afford the train tickets. Instead he made an audition tape in which Joe read other characters’ lines. Joe sent the tape to his agent who passed it to the casting director. “And next there was I on set with Helen McCrory and Cillian Murphy.”
Soon he was up against not only McCrory and Murphy, but one of Britain’s most fearsome actors, Tom Hardy, who plays Alfie Solomons, the psychopathic Jewish gangster. I note that Hardy and Cole (and Murphy for that matter) are of similarly modest height, but that must have been intimidating, shouting into Hardy’s face?
“I’m trying to determine whether or not intimidating is the right word. It probably is. It’s exciting. It’s definitely exciting,” he says. “There were a couple of scenes in series three, one in particular where I found myself not on camera because the camera was on Tom, and I was watching Tom and sort of forgetting to act because I was just so intrigued by what he was doing. That was exciting. I was very young then. It was very early on in my career. Now, that wouldn’t happen, but back then I definitely remember being distracted by the performance and that’s a credit to what he can do on camera and what he can do with his body and his voice.”
But tell me, I ask, was it more intimidating to play against Tom Hardy in an argument or Margot Robbie in a shower? “Actually,” he says, “Helen [McCrory] was the most intimidating to act with because she was such a force of nature.”