Series creator and stars pay tribute to the woman who made it a phenomenon
Benji Wilson | February 20, 2022 | The Sunday Times
So when Helen McCrory was told in 2012 she was going to be playing a character called Aunt Polly in what was described to her as a period piece set in Birmingham, her answer was typically blunt. “I said, ‘No I’m not.’ I thought I’d be standing there with a mangle and a fag hanging out of my mouth wondering when the boys would come home. Little did I know.”
Yes, Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby is Peaky Blinders’ hard-as-nails poster boy. But the premise of Peaky Blinders is a story of broken men returning from the war and trying to fit into society. And that society had consisted of women while the men had been away. As Polly says to Tommy in the first episode: “This whole bloody enterprise was women’s business while you boys were away at war.”
A decade on and Peaky Blinders is back on our screens without its totem. McCrory died in April last year aged 52, of breast cancer that she had concealed from all but her closest friends and family.
At the end of series five, Aunt Polly resigned from her role at the Shelby company. This series begins four years later and although Polly does not appear, she is a strong presence, with Tommy hearing her voice in the opening scene and her spirit running through the show that she made such a success.
The show’s creator and sole writer, Steven Knight, says the feminist strand of Peaky Blinders was informed by his working-class background in Birmingham. “The women ruled the roost. During the First World War, when the men were away, women did everything. So the idea that you’d have this environment where the women were completely subservient? Nonsense. It isn’t like that. And it wasn’t like that. It’s just a question of reflecting reality.”
Knight chose to reflect that reality via a matriarchal powerhouse who even when she is not on screen is inside Tommy’s head. In 2012 Knight and the show’s original director, Otto Bathurst, a friend of McCrory’s, came to her London home to tell her what they were planning.
“Steve Knight said, ‘Do you like westerns?’” McCrory said, speaking to me in 2019. “I love westerns. I used to buy those penny westerns from a stall in Camden Market and I loved everything from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to Once Upon a Time in the West. He said, ‘OK: we’re going to do it western.’ He wanted this epic quality that the Americans do so well. We just don’t do it.”
In the same discussion Bathurst mentioned that he was looking to do something different with the music for this interwar Brummie western, too. He told her they were looking to license some songs from the White Stripes. By coincidence, Jack White’s lawyer was McCrory’s son’s godmother, so they sent White the first two episodes and he agreed to let them use the music, which he never usually did. McCrory said: “Everybody was going, ‘What the hell is Jack White doing doing the music — we thought this was going to be period!’”
It wasn’t just the soundtrack, also featuring PJ Harvey and Nick Cave — in snagging an actress of McCrory’s calibre, Peaky Blinders was laying down a statement of intent. Although by 2012 several US television series had started casting big-name film actors, in British television it was a departure.
“I was aware that there was something happening in television,” Murphy says. “Britain was slightly more behind the curve than America at that point — there was nothing that had broken out internationally.”
He had been watching The Wire and Breaking Bad and had started to realise that long-form television was where all the good writing was headed.
“What you could do with story, with character, was pretty revolutionary. I remember calling my agent and I said, ‘Is there anything happening in telly because I’d love to try it.’ Two days later he sent me the first two episodes of Peaky Blinders.”
McCrory — who was as well known as Murphy and if anything more renowned for her theatre work — gave Peaky Blinders international cachet. Casting follows casting and the presence of those two big-hitters led to Sam Neill signing on for series one, playing a detective, with Tom Hardy and Adrien Brody to come in subsequent series.
McCrory still had to make the role of Polly her own. Knight writes women well (he wrote Spencer, the Princess Diana film) but it was only when McCrory started working her magic that Polly achieved her full splendour.
Jamie Glazebrook has been Peaky Blinders’ executive producer from the beginning and says: “Steve wrote a great part for Polly. And then he saw who was acting it. I think the thing is when you see someone that good, see how committed she was and what she brought to the character, then you raise your game.”
“Helen was absolutely central to this,” Knight adds. “Tommy, Arthur and Polly are the heart of Peaky and she was so brilliant as an actor. So brilliant as a human being. It was a terrible, terrible loss. As a writer normally you’re the architect of events, but sometimes life and death step in. When that happens you have to cope with it in the same way as you would cope with it in your life. You have to pick through the rubble and build something else out of it.”
“It’s been hard, I won’t lie,” Murphy says. They were due to begin shooting in March 2020 but it was postponed until January last year. “It was a very tense, difficult period to be making work. But most of all we lost Helen, which was so devastating for all of us, her Peaky family.”
Sophie Rundle is part of that Peaky family. She returns for the final series as Ada Shelby, Tommy’s sister, and she too has been with the production since its inception.
“We felt her loss enormously; she was intrinsic to the show. Helen made Polly what she was, and I don’t think Peaky would have been the same without Polly. We just really missed her. It was quite devastating.”
Natasha O’Keeffe also filmed scenes with McCrory. Her character, Lizzie, is a prostitute who becomes Tommy’s partner. “Lizzy was looking and learning from this incredible force and this matriarch — how to hold herself; how to dress herself; how to function in what seemed like a man’s world. And I was looking and learning from Helen.”
That chutzpah, that middle-finger mentality, began with McCrory and then permeated through the whole show. Much like the gang it portrays, Peaky Blinders, a series with a budget roughly half that of an average pilot episode in America, took chances on outsiders.
Two series played out on BBC2 with middling ratings before Netflix took it to a new audience — with celebrity acolytes from Ronnie Wood and David Bowie to Snoop Dogg, who said the show “reminded me how I got into gang culture”. In Britain there was a promotion to BBC1 and then — five series in — in 2018 the show won the best drama Bafta, beating The Crown. “It came to the point that Bafta could no longer ignore us,” McCrory said the next year.
A seventh series had been planned but it was announced last year that this sixth will be the last. There is a film in the works, as well as a ballet, The Redemption of Tommy Shelby, adapted by Knight.
“We felt with the passing of Helen that it all seemed to be pointing towards ‘the end of the beginning’,” Knight says. “Let’s end the beginning. Then let’s do the film. And then let’s see where we go in terms of spin-offs …”
O’Keeffe remembers sitting behind the monitor and watching Murphy do the last scene of the shooting schedule. “Everyone was just so raw and in bits — because of the passing of Helen during filming,” she says. “It just had that extra element of sadness; we didn’t have our ally there with us to finish the show.”
Peaky Blinders returns on BBC1 on Feb 27