Category: Theatre

The tiny dynamo that is Helen McCrory, who’s twice played Cherie Blair, was a forthright politician in Skyfall and served three times in the Harry Potter films as the malevolent Narcissa Malfoy, is perched just so on a sofa at The Ivy, a big heat patch plastered wonkily on her neck. ‘I hurt it doing Medea,’ she explains. During the rapturously received staging of Euripides’ tragedy at the National, McCrory’s character was required to faint. But one night she hit another actor as she fell, ending up semi-concussed. ‘I went from ranting Greek bitch to Orphan Annie in about one beat,’ she says self-mockingly. But with a long career on stage behind her — among other accolades, she was nominated for an Evening Standard award for the Donmar’s 2002 pro-duction of Uncle Vanya — McCrory knew that the show had to go on. ‘It added a frisson to the evening. Everyone was a bit more interested in my acting after that,’ she hoots.

She’s also the leading lady of the BBC’s Peaky Blinders, the second series of which started last night. The super-stylised gangster drama — violence straight out of Al Capone’s Chicago, fashions and haircuts out of hipster Dalston — is ‘tongue-in-cheek’, as McCrory puts it. But where the first series, quoting creator and writer Steven Knight, was all about opium, this season’s drug is cocaine. ‘One is a sedative, woozy, decadent… Whereas coke is a skanky, speedy, nasty, sweaty, anxious drug that makes everyone think they’re really interesting,’ she says with a sardonic smile. The reason for this narcotic change of pace is, naturally, London. Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) wants to expand the Peaky Blinders’ illegal gambling operation from the Midlands to the capital. ‘This year we see the fragility of all the characters. The cracks are beginning to show as they get out of their comfort zone; as they come down to London.’ The cracks are showing for McCrory’s Aunt Polly, too: in the opening episode we saw her character shifting from hard-as-nails matriarch of the Birmingham razor gang led by Shelby to hard-as-nails matriarch unmoored by the loss of her children.

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