Tag: Tommy Shelby

Categories Peaky Blinders Print Media Tributes

Peaky Blinders’ Cillian Murphy on Helen McCrory, the show’s beating heart

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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
Family ties: Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders
ROBERT VIGLASKY/BBC
On the face of it there is no more machismo-laden, gun-slinging, smoke-smothered, balls-out blood-and-thunder television show than Peaky Blinders — back next week for its sixth and final series. The between-the-wars Birmingham gangster epic’s signature shot is a line of men in flat caps walking down a smog-smothered street in swaggering slow motion. Lo-fi garage rock music blares as the men caress their tommy guns. The image speaks: this is man’s work.

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.”

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Finn Cole on Peaky Blinders season 6 and missing Helen McCrory

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Finn Cole tells what Helen McCrory taught him

Andrew Billen | The Times | February 19, 2022

Cole with Helen McCrory, right, and Anya Taylor-Joy
Cole with Helen McCrory, right, and Anya Taylor-Joy
ROBERT VIGLASKY/BBC
Helenistic’s Note: Here is an extract from the actor’s interview with The Times in which he talks about the sixth season of The Peaky Blinders and missing Helen McCrory. You can read the interview in its entirety here.

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

Helen McCrory: A shining star at her peak

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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.”’

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The Observer’s Obituaries of 2021: Helen McCrory Remembered by Cillian Murphy

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Cillian Remembers Helen: “She was too young. You can’t help but think of all the amazing roles she would have had”

Cillian Murphy | December 12, 2021 | The Observer

17 August 1968 – 16 April 2021

The actor on his Peaky Blinders co-star, a supremely talented and compassionate performer whose grace and dignity never deserted her.

I first met Helen in the late 90s, when I attended an audition for a play at the Donmar Warehouse in London – I think Colin Farrell got the role. For some reason, she was there. I was just starting out, really nervous, and I think she picked up on that. We went outside at one point to smoke a rollie and she was really kind and supportive. I mentioned it to her when we started doing Peaky Blinders and she actually remembered it.

Helen had this genuine compassion. It was part of her DNA. She wasn’t an actor who turned up, did the gig and went home. All the way through Peaky Blinders, she would chat to members of the crew as well as the actors. She knew everyone’s name. It’s a huge collaboration making a series like that and it’s easy to think it’s only about the actors, but she was always very aware of the collective aspect of what we do. At the wrap for series two, she actually got up and performed a poem to us all. It was about how special the show was and how great the crew were. It was humorous, but really considerate. She had obviously put a lot of thought into it. It was pure Helen.

Continue reading The Observer’s Obituaries of 2021: Helen McCrory Remembered by Cillian Murphy