Finn Cole tells what Helen McCrory taught him
Andrew Billen | The Times | February 19, 2022
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