How ‘Peaky Blinders’ Became a Binge-Worthy Hit
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 you’ve 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 can’t understand why,” he confesses.
Yet the curious chop is central to Murphy’s 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 England’s 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 show’s first two seasons incorporated WW I-era PTSD, opium habits, the IRA, a Javert-like inspector (Sam Neill), the world’s most psychotic Jewish baker/bootlegger (a terrifying Tom Hardy) and an obsession with expanding and legitimizing the family business beyond their homebase of Birmingham.
Peaky Blinders‘ showrunner Steven Knight didn’t 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 father’s uncles were, in fact, bona fide Blinders themselves; as a child, his mother worked as a runner for the gang’s bookies. And as Knight dived into his research, he was surprised to find that his folks hadn’t embellished their violent stories of Birmingham life at all — they’d 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 he’d 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. “What’s great about the fact that we’re doing it now instead of 10, or even 20 years ago,” he says, “is that we’ve got the film technology to finally execute it properly. And people are watching television on better screens now. So it’s worthwhile making it look good” Knight says he originally conceptualized Peaky Blinders as something like a Western, from its visuals (there’s 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.”
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