helenistic, Author at Helen McCrory

Peaky Blinders’ Cillian Murphy on Helen McCrory, the show’s beating heart

On February 20, 2022February 20, 2022 By helenistic No Comments

Series creator and stars pay tribute to the woman who made it a phenomenon

Benji Wilson | February 20, 2022 | The Sunday Times

Family ties: Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders

ROBERT VIGLASKY/BBC

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.”

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Finn Cole on Peaky Blinders season 6 and missing Helen McCrory

On February 19, 2022February 19, 2022 By helenistic No Comments

Finn Cole tells what Helen McCrory taught him

Andrew Billen | The Times | February 19, 2022

Cole with Helen McCrory, right, and Anya Taylor-Joy

Helenistic’s Note: Here is an extract from the actor’s interview with The Times in which he talks about the sixth season of The Peaky Blinders and missing Helen McCrory. You can read the interview in its entirety here.

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.

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Peaky Blinders director hints Helen McCrory may appear in sixth season

On February 15, 2022February 15, 2022 By helenistic No Comments

Will Polly Gray appear in Season Six of Peaky Blinders?

Stephen Milton | February 13, 2022 | The Sunday Times

Helenistic’s Note: Here is an extract from the director’s interview with The Sunday Times in which he talks about the sixth season of The Peaky Blinders and hints that Helen may appear in this season. You can read the interview in its entirety here.

The final season of Peaky Blinders will serve as a moment of reflection after the loss of Helen McCrory, who died from cancer last year. She played Polly, the legendary matriarch of the Shelby dynasty, but the actress was forced to abandon plans to reprise her role owing to the delays in production and the deterioration of her health. Byrne reveals that McCrory will make an important appearance in the new season opener, however.

“I had footage of Helen that I didn’t use during the last season and found this really special line that sets up season six so perfectly. In the opening scene, Tommy hears Polly’s voice in his head saying, ‘There will be war and one of you will die but which one I cannot tell.’ And that sets it up between Tommy and Michael Gray [Tommy’s cousin plotting to take control of the Shelby family empire]. It was perfect, a gift.

“It’s been a surreal experience and everyone who knew Helen, and loved working with her, is still processing what has happened. She was a really wonderful person.”

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Cillian Murphy: Final Season of ‘Peaky Blinders’ Is ‘Richest and Deepest’ to Date

On February 14, 2022February 14, 2022 By helenistic No Comments

“I think the whole series is really in tribute to her and to honor her”

Monica Marie Zorrilla | Variety | February 11, 2022

Cillian Murphy was named one of the greatest Irish film actors in 2020 and has been nominated for multiple international awards over a 25-year career. But in stepping into an executive producing role in recent years, the “Peaky Blinders” star and frequent Christopher Nolan collaborator is discovering another side to the craft that’s been a humbling experience.

“I had to look at my own performances in a very cold and objective way,” Murphy tells Variety. “I think it’s a valuable lesson to look at the story in its entirety, without just, like, focusing on the size of your ears.”

When Murphy became a producer on Seasons 5 and 6 of “Peaky Blinders,” he had to take on new duties such as helping the edit team after long days of working as an actor and analyzing his portrayal of Tommy Shelby, the protagonist of the ruthless BBC period crime drama.

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Helen McCrory: A shining star at her peak

On February 6, 2022February 6, 2022 By helenistic No Comments

She stole the show and our hearts

By Cole Moreton | February 6, 2022 | YOU Magazine

Aunt Polly dresses to kill. Literally. In series two of Peaky Blinders, she gets all glammed up in a hat, gloves and lace choker plus hidden revolver. It’s a scene that reveals her ruthlessness as she seeks outa police chief who has raped her. Polly gets close enough to kiss him, then shoots the devil through the heart. And as he dies, Polly spits out a line that has come to define the show: ‘Don’t f*** with the Peaky Blinders.’ As the camera lingers on her wild eyes and drying tears, we see again why Helen McCrory was hailed as one of the best actors of her generation, even before she agreed to play a leading role in this brutal family drama set in the slums of Birmingham just after the First World War.

Helen turned it down at first, for fear of being asked to play a cliché. ‘My own grandparents grew up in the slums of Glasgow and were miners’ kids in Cardiff and I thought I was going to be there with a mangle saying things like: “Gotta get up early to get a wash on in the back yard.”’

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