The BBC crime drama returns in style for its sixth and final season
By Abby Robinson | Radio Times | February 22, 2022
Categories Peaky Blinders Print Media Reviews
Peaky Blinders Season 6: Helen McCrory Tribute is a Triumph
Tag: Cillian Murphy
Categories Peaky Blinders Print Media Tributes
Peaky Blinders’ Cillian Murphy on Helen McCrory, the show’s beating heart
Series creator and stars pay tribute to the woman who made it a phenomenon
Benji Wilson | February 20, 2022 | The Sunday Times
Family ties: Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders
ROBERT VIGLASKY/BBC
So when Helen McCrory was told in 2012 she was going to be playing a character called Aunt Polly in what was described to her as a period piece set in Birmingham, her answer was typically blunt. “I said, ‘No I’m not.’ I thought I’d be standing there with a mangle and a fag hanging out of my mouth wondering when the boys would come home. Little did I know.”
Yes, Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby is Peaky Blinders’ hard-as-nails poster boy. But the premise of Peaky Blinders is a story of broken men returning from the war and trying to fit into society. And that society had consisted of women while the men had been away. As Polly says to Tommy in the first episode: “This whole bloody enterprise was women’s business while you boys were away at war.”
Continue reading Peaky Blinders’ Cillian Murphy on Helen McCrory, the show’s beating heart
Categories Peaky Blinders Print Media Tributes
Finn Cole on Peaky Blinders season 6 and missing Helen McCrory
Finn Cole tells what Helen McCrory taught him
Andrew Billen | The Times | February 19, 2022
Cole with Helen McCrory, right, and Anya Taylor-Joy
ROBERT VIGLASKY/BBC
The final series of Peaky Blinders, Stephen Knight’s operatic celebration of Birmingham gangsters, is upon us. As ever, the Shelbys, the fantastically dysfunctional family entrusted with organising the city’s crime between the wars, will generate a frenzy of interwoven subplots. In essence, however, the saga will resolve into a power struggle — not, obviously, between good and evil or even between bad and worse, but between the old and the new.
On one side is Peaky’s perennial star turn, Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby. Tommy is cunning, clever and ruthless — but also superstitious, ravaged by drink, haunted by his dead wife, outwitted in the previous series by Oswald Mosley and, as a good/bad Catholic, distractedly chasing the impossibility of absolution.
On the other is his cousin, Michael Gray, 13 years his junior, educated, dead-eyed, as lethal with an accountant’s pen as a razor blade and heavy with ambition to transform the Shelby operation from a provincial assassins’ club into a global opium-trader. Finn Cole, the 26-year-old Londoner who has played Michael since series two, puts it plainly: the omnipotent Tommy has noticed his energy and is intimidated.
Indeed, Michael’s mother, “Aunt” Polly Gray, has already forecast a war between them: “And one of you will die, but which one I cannot tell.” Since Polly, the series’ gypsy princess, merits a four-out-of-five tip advisor rating for fortune telling, I ask Cole whether he had read that line in the script with a certain chill.
Continue reading Finn Cole on Peaky Blinders season 6 and missing Helen McCrory
Categories Peaky Blinders Print Media Tributes
Cillian Murphy: Final Season of ‘Peaky Blinders’ Is ‘Richest and Deepest’ to Date
“I think the whole series is really in tribute to her and to honor her”
Monica Marie Zorrilla | Variety | February 11, 2022
Cillian Murphy was named one of the greatest Irish film actors in 2020 and has been nominated for multiple international awards over a 25-year career. But in stepping into an executive producing role in recent years, the “Peaky Blinders” star and frequent Christopher Nolan collaborator is discovering another side to the craft that’s been a humbling experience.
“I had to look at my own performances in a very cold and objective way,” Murphy tells Variety. “I think it’s a valuable lesson to look at the story in its entirety, without just, like, focusing on the size of your ears.”
When Murphy became a producer on Seasons 5 and 6 of “Peaky Blinders,” he had to take on new duties such as helping the edit team after long days of working as an actor and analyzing his portrayal of Tommy Shelby, the protagonist of the ruthless BBC period crime drama.
Continue reading Cillian Murphy: Final Season of ‘Peaky Blinders’ Is ‘Richest and Deepest’ to Date
Categories Peaky Blinders Print Media Tributes
Helen McCrory: A shining star at her peak
She stole the show and our hearts
By Cole Moreton | February 6, 2022 | YOU Magazine
Aunt Polly dresses to kill. Literally. In series two of Peaky Blinders, she gets all glammed up in a hat, gloves and lace choker plus hidden revolver. It’s a scene that reveals her ruthlessness as she seeks outa police chief who has raped her. Polly gets close enough to kiss him, then shoots the devil through the heart. And as he dies, Polly spits out a line that has come to define the show: ‘Don’t f*** with the Peaky Blinders.’ As the camera lingers on her wild eyes and drying tears, we see again why Helen McCrory was hailed as one of the best actors of her generation, even before she agreed to play a leading role in this brutal family drama set in the slums of Birmingham just after the First World War.
Helen turned it down at first, for fear of being asked to play a cliché. ‘My own grandparents grew up in the slums of Glasgow and were miners’ kids in Cardiff and I thought I was going to be there with a mangle saying things like: “Gotta get up early to get a wash on in the back yard.”’