Helen McCrory: “What I love about travel is the freedom. Anything that gets in the way of that is missing the point”
by | October 20, 2014
Helen McCrory’s Travelling Life
Categories Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media
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?!”
Categories Appearances Audio Books Personal and Family Life Poetry
Helen and Damian Read Poetry at Cheltenham Literature Festival
The Love Book: Great Love Poems
by Damianista | Fan Fun with Damian Lewis | October 13, 2014
One of the main poetry projects Helen and Damian support is the Love Book project including a book as well as an app, a brilliant collection of classic and contemporary love poems that vary from Shakespeare to E.E. Cummings to Maya Angelou.
It is always a pleasure to talk about the Love Book project and an absolutely delightful Love Book event that I was extremely lucky to attend in October 2014 at Cheltenham Literature Festival: Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory read Great Love Poems. followed by a wonderful book signing by Allie, Damian and Helen!
Continue reading Helen and Damian Read Poetry at Cheltenham Literature Festival
Categories Interviews Peaky Blinders Video
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.