Cillian Murphy has been having a bad hair day for the past three years. My incentive to get rid of this particular hair style has never diminished, Murphy says of the brutal undercut he sports on the historical British mob drama Peaky Blinders, which just kicked off its third season on Netflix. Popular at the turn of the century, the particular do Murphy sports onscreen features a short back and sides, with a longer mop up top a sort of turn-of-the-century proto-fade. Yet if youve been around London recently, you might see people copping that same vintage cut. Now in the UK you see fellas voluntarily asking for that look. I cant understand why, he confesses.
Yet the curious chop is central to Murphys leading role as Sir Thomas Shelby, the imposing patriarch of the racketeering Shelby clan in the stylized, grit-and-grime crime series. Inspired by the real-life Birmingham gangsters who ran Englands racetracks in the early 1900s the name comes from the flat caps they wore with razor blades sewn in the brim the binge-worthy show follows Tommy and his crew as they wrestle for power among their low-life peers and acceptance from high society. Set from 1919-1922, the shows first two seasons incorporated WW I-era PTSD, opium habits, the IRA, a Javert-like inspector (Sam Neill), the worlds most psychotic Jewish baker/bootlegger (a terrifying Tom Hardy) and an obsession with expanding and legitimizing the family business beyond their homebase of Birmingham.
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Peaky Blinders showrunner Steven Knight didnt just glean the scabrous tales of the Shelby family from textbooks, however. His parents both hail from Small Heath the same lawless West Midlands place where the show is set. His fathers uncles were, in fact, bona fide Blinders themselves; as a child, his mother worked as a runner for the gangs bookies. And as Knight dived into his research, he was surprised to find that his folks hadnt embellished their violent stories of Birmingham life at all theyd actually eased back on them. Like, for example, the anecdote of a man who used to go around the pubs with a rat in a cage. He would put his head in the cage and kill the rat with his teeth, says Knight. And people would throw coins at him afterwards! It was madness.
The showrunner says hed been keen to immortalize these stories since childhood, and even sketched out a rough treatment about 1920s gangsters nearly two decades ago. After writing a number of feature films (notably the Russian-Mafia drama Eastern Promises), Knight eventually came back around to the idea years later. Whats great about the fact that were doing it now instead of 10, or even 20 years ago, he says, is that weve got the film technology to finally execute it properly. And people are watching television on better screens now. So its worthwhile making it look good Knight says he originally conceptualized Peaky Blinders as something like a Western, from its visuals (theres plenty of gunslinging and getaways on horseback) to the way it probes what he calls an impossible masculinity. [But] what I wanted to do was mythologize the rest of us. You know: the working class.
Cillian Murphy was the first person to be cast, thought Knight didnt write the part of Tommy with the Irish actor in mind. The two met while Knight was casting the lead for his feature directorial debut Redemption (2013); the role eventually went to Jason Statham, but the young man had left an impression. A self-professed fan of Knights writing, the even-keeled Murphy had to persuade him that he was capable of playing the tormented, terse and totally volatile Tommy. (It helped that when the pair went up to Birmingham for a day, Murphy swiftly picked up on the distinctive Brummie accent). Because [Tommys] so different from me, its such a distance to travel to get to him emotionally and physically, Murphy says. Im not interested in stories that make you come out of the cinema going meh. I want you to leave a cinema going, fucking hell, I need a drink.'
Once Knight assembled his cast (including big- and small-screen veterans such as Paul Anderson, Helen McCory and Annabelle Wallis), shot the shows inaugural six episodes and aired the first season in the U.K., the result was not exactly love at first sight.The Guardian called the shows pilot a steampunk beer commercial that doesnt so much sidestep gangster cliches as fling its arms round them. When Netflix started streaming episodes across the pond, the New York Times lamented that for a sprawling soap opera that packs in Roma curses, shell shock, hash pipes, Chinatown prostitutes and gang members sporting the 1919 version of a half-shaved boy-band haircut, it doesnt have quite enough juice.
Then Season Two rolled around, the stakes got higher, and the show finally began to find its audience. A sizable Tumblr community gushing about the show through GIFs of Tommy smoking cigarettes grew steadily. Soon, its combo of Boardwalk Empire-style dapperness and Sons of Anarchy-esque pulp had folks such Snoop Dogg and the late David Bowie professing their fandom; the latter even gave the green light for the series to use cuts from his final album, Blackstar, for its new season before his passing. (The show has made good use of its anachronistic soundtrack everyone from Tom Waits to Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and Radiohead have had their tunes put to brilliant use.)
Murphy has a theory about how the show eventually became a hit. It didnt happen because of a mass marketing campaign, he says. It just happened because people liked the show and told their friends about it. That word organic is overused, but in this case its appropriate. A bigger, much more rabid audience tuned in for the shows third season after it began airing on BBC 2 last month, which finds the recently nouveau riche Shelbys clamoring to scale a rickety social ladder. The question Ive wanted to ask throughout the whole of the series is: Can you escape where youre from?' Knight says. Thats particularly true of the Shelbys theyre born absolutely on the wrong side of the tracks [and then] they find themselves in the company of high society. While hes mum on where Peaky Blinders might go after this latest batch of episodes (its since been renewed for a fourth and fifth season), the showrunner hopes the series will end when Sir Thomas Shelby hears the first air raid siren of World War II.
A lot of great characters were seeing on television [now] theyre not tropes. Murphy says. Its not the clean-cut hero or the nefarious villains; they demonstrate a lot of the frailties and foibles that we all demonstrate as human beings. Thats Tommy. And what if he encountered his antihero on the street? Id probably cross the street, he declares with a laugh.