Peaky Blinders returns to BBC Two with Series 3
by BBC | You Tube | April 22, 2016
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Helen McCrory from Peaky Blinders on playing lethal Aunt Polly
Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly shows it isn’t just the men who are deadly in Peaky Blinders
By Matt Bungard | November 17, 2014 | The Age
Did you have to do much research into the actual Peaky Blinders gang before you took on the role?
There’s not that much written about the Peaky Blinders – there’s about two or three books that touch on them, and that touch on the violence in Birmingham and the gangs that were going around in the north of England at the time. But what I did do is I spoke a lot to (program creator) Steven Knight, and he was inspired by stories that his father told him. [His father] had been sent to deliver a message to his uncle, and he was terrified; he had to go to a part of town that he’d never been to. He went down Garrison Lane and knocked on the door and went into a smoke-filled room, and saw it was an illegal betting shop. And in the room, behind the glass there were these three men drinking homemade gin out of jam jars and were wearing the most beautiful three-piece suits and peaked caps, surrounded by piles of money. And his father became obsessed with this world – he didn’t ever join it, but he found out all these stories and passed them on to Steve. And so really, Steve is the person that all the actors go to to talk about these stories and he knows all these characters; they all existed. So it was through him, really. Like a lot of this history, it’s passed on orally but isn’t written down.
Continue reading Helen McCrory from Peaky Blinders on playing lethal Aunt Polly
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Helen McCrory: “How dare you sit on your arse and not support other women?!”
Peaky Blinders’ Helen McCrory on playing Aunt Polly, working-class Britain – and the lack of feminism in today’s society
How much have you enjoyed creating season two?
Polly’s story this year is much, much more interesting. I don’t know if Steven [Knight, writer] made a conscious effort or it’s just what he found the most interesting from the last series, but the women’s parts on the whole [are more interesting]. I think you have to establish that the world of the Shelbys is a man’s world, but once you’ve got that up and running, then you can start to look at the women’s world, which were much more delineated than they are now, so they are completely different characters and completely different sets and settings. I’ve had a fantastic time this year, he’s written me one of my best parts I’ve ever played.
It even passes the Bechdel test. Does it offer a more interesting perspective of women in period dramas?
If you actually look at the working class, the working class women ran the homes, those women worked hard, they were the heartbeat of the society, knowing where the kids are, running it all, making sure that the drunk man in the pub was picked up by somebody else’s husband and brought home, and knowing what’s happening on the streets, because you have to, because no one else is helping you. So yes, just by setting it in working-class Britain, which was 95% of the rest of the country, yeah it does.
Continue reading Helen McCrory: “How dare you sit on your arse and not support other women?!”
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VIDEO: Helen and Cillian Murphy on Peaky Blinders Season 2
Aunt Polly and Thomas Shelby
HeyUGuys | YouTube | October 2, 2014
Categories Interviews Medea Peaky Blinders Print Media
Helen McCrory: A Class Act
On-stage romance, rude reviews and skinny-dipping with Damian Lewis
by Craig McLean | October 2, 2014 | The Evening Standard
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.