Peaky Blinders Second Series is Around the Corner
With the second series of fantastic BBC Two drama Peaky Blinders just around the corner, we couldn’t resist catching up with Helen McCrory – who plays Aunt Polly – to find out just what we can expect from the show and her character going forward.
Going back to before series one, what initially drew you to the role of Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders?
Well I was sent the scripts in the traditional way, they came through the post, and Otto Bathurst phoned me up who I’d worked with before and said: ‘There’s a part I’d like you to have a look at’, and I was just fascinated in this world. I didn’t think that I’d seen it on British television before. I thought that we’re known in Britain to do our television histories, but they tend to be of the upper classes or Upstairs, Downstairs set in London, in a white stucco house crescent and to see a whole world that was now set in working class, criminal streets of Birmingham, with men coming back from the First World War, and the impact of war on them, the impact of communism, the impact of women suddenly working at home and working out of the home and having to hand it back to the men was just a fascinating part of our own history, that we are still reeling from now and picking up the consequences from. So, I said ‘yes’, and then on top of that, Otto talked to me about the way that he wanted to film it – was much more in the world of John Ford and the Westerns, and instead of doing British gritty realism, to make it look cinematic and to have fun with it, and we’ve continued that into the second series – these huge epic landscapes and, this idea of Wild West, still prevails as a tone.
Continue reading Helen McCrory exclusive interview – Peaky Blinders
