Tag: Aunt Polly

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Helen McCrory Interview: Woman & Home

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The Real Me

by Victoria Young | Woman & Home | Autumn, 2014

Helen McCrory talks to Victoria Young about feminism, marriage to a sex symbol – and being a gypsy at heart.

Actress Helen McCrory, 46, has played everyone from Medea to Cherie Blair as well as Polly Gray in Peaky Blinders. She’s married to actor Damian Lewis. They live in London and have two children, Manon, eight, and Gulliver, seven.

I grew up in Africa because my father was a diplomat. So I was lucky enough to grow up in a world without advertising. As a result, I’ve never judged myself on what I was supposed to look like. It’s good and bad. When it came to filming the second series of Peaky Blinders, I decided “I want Polly to look rougher, she should look haggard, life beaten, absolutely exhausted.” I then saw the first episode and remembered the adage, “Be careful what you wish for.”

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Categories Interviews Peaky Blinders Print Media

BBC Media Centre: Interview with Helen McCrory

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Helen McCrory plays Aunt Polly Gray in BBC Two’s Peaky Blinders

BBC Media Centre | August 23, 2013

You’re looking at a new generation of women that were no longer happy to stay at home with a clothes mangle and were coming out. This independence brings a friction to the family and this friction causes these strong characters to come through.

— Helen McCrory

Describe the world of Peaky Blinders

The world is Birmingham, 1919, in the back streets where a gang called the Peaky Blinders are the top dogs. Named after caps they have razor blades in. It’s a world, post First World War. Where men are brutalised. Where women for the first time have had power and are having to hand it back to men. Where the local gypsy community is running the races. Where London talks to Birmingham, talks to Leeds, and these gangs are running a new society that was born from the First World War. Where people questioned everything that came from above. No longer was church or government good. The Ulster police were being shipped into this area because an anarchy was going on in the streets. And we play this anarchy and this street life.

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