Snoop Dogg, pig fights and the wrong kind of snow: Cillian Murphy and Barry Keoghan talk Peaky Blinders | film

IIn June 2023, Barry Keoghan texted Cillian Murphy to wish him a Happy Father’s Day. The pair had shared the screen six years earlier in Dunkirk. “Cillian and Colin [Farrell] “I’m a huge fan of them, and I always keep in touch with them,” Keoghan says. A response from Murphy came shortly after: “Thank you. Would you like to play my son in Peaky Blinders?”

Murphy remembers it a little differently: he was the one who initiated the connection (and so Tim Roth and Rebecca Ferguson joined). But he is happy to let Keoghan’s version be recorded as fact.

“That’s a better story!” He says. “And I definitely forgot it was Father’s Day. Maybe no one was paying attention to me at home?”

However, Murphy continues, Keoghan was always his first choice to play Duke, the goofy, prodigal son of Tommy Shelby (Murphy) in the BBC and Netflix drama’s big screen swan song. (The character was first introduced in season six, then played by Conrad Khan.) “Barry is a firecracker — put a camera on him and suddenly he’s an eye-catcher,” he says. “There’s a danger to him… an unpredictability, which I think you need for that character. But also this vulnerability. And vulnerability on screen is a great strength as an actor.”

Season 6 of Peaky Blinders ended in 2022, in which Tommy confronted Oswald Mosley, got through the end of lockdown, avenged his Aunt Polly’s murder and grieved his daughter Ruby, all while being fooled into believing he had a terminal illness. The final scene saw Murphy’s depressed hero riding into the fog on a white horse to do who knows what.

The film takes place six years later, in 1940, with Nazi bombs falling on Birmingham. Tommy is holed up in his country mansion, having isolated himself from his family. He attempts to write his memoirs, but is regularly distracted by the lure of an opium pipe and horrific visions of his many dead relatives.

Duke, now unscrupulous even by criminal standards, runs his own gang, smuggles contraband and has struck a deal with John Beckett, a British Nazi agent played by Tim Roth, to flood the country with millions in counterfeit money and tip the war in Germany’s favor. We first see Keoghan’s character beat up a police officer with shocking efficiency. Today, in a London hotel, the actor is smiling and making eye contact under a mop top — he plays Ringo Starr in Sam Mendes’ upcoming quartet of Beatles films.

Keoghan is a big fan of Peaky – his decision to name his dog Duke predates his casting as the character – so he understood the pressure. “I know there’s a wild fan base out there and they’re going to have expectations about this movie,” he says. “So it’s impossible not to feel that way. But I felt very welcome. And working with Cillian – what a pleasure.”

Joy is not the word that comes to my mind during the first scene the characters share: a fight in the pig pen. Presumably whatever the pair ended up with wasn’t the real thing?

“No, it was bullshit,” Murphy says. “Pigs poop a lot.” He shivers and gets lost in memories. “They really do shit. We were in it.”

“That was my first day on set,” Keoghan says. “I cracked all my knuckles too. I remember punching the ground and Cillian was told: ‘Man, you don’t have to do that.’ But I wanted to, I needed to pace myself to go for it. It was a great day!”

He says watching Murphy angrily walk towards him was the highlight. “It’s Tommy Shelby. I was like, ‘Wow. I’m in trouble now. Where’s Cillian gone?'”

pBringing the six eaky Blinders series to the small screen has been a series of growing returns and bizarre influence – and not just in terms of hats. It started out as a cult favorite attracting just over 2 million viewers, but at its peak was attracting nearly three times that. Three main factors appear to have driven the success of the show created by Steven Knight, whose credits include the films Dirty Pretty Things and Locke, as well as the Disney+ series A Thousand Blows and the BBC’s SAS: Rogue Heroes. (He also co-created Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.) First, word of mouth, second, the move from BBC Two to One, and third, the show’s acquisition by Netflix in 2014 for a global audience – it’s available in 190 countries.

Murphy believes it’s mostly down to word of mouth. He says the BBC didn’t promote it in the pre-peak fever era. “The success is entirely fan-made. There was no in-house advertising on the BBC. I remember sitting down to watch the first episode and the announcer said ‘Next, Peaky Blinders starring Cillian Murphy…’ and I thought, ‘Oh, fuck this’, and I turned off the TV and went to bed.”

It’s hard to pinpoint what fans love so much about the show. At its core, it’s a gangster saga with some moments of outrageous violence, but it’s also an old-fashioned family drama. When Knight met boxer Oleksandr Usyk, he told him that Peaky Blinders was his favorite show because he thought it was an accurate depiction of family life. Murphy’s appeal cannot be understated, nor can the cast, which at times included Tom Hardy, Stephen Graham, Poul Anderson, the late Helen McCrory, Adrien Brody, Sam Neill, Aidan Gillen and Charlotte Riley. There are also hats.

In 2019, the inaugural (and so far only) Legitimate Peaky Blinders Festival brought an ‘immersive showcase’ of the show to 15,000 punters, including live music, fashion shows, free haircuts, a gypsy camp and (organised) bare-knuckle fights. The cosplay was pretty obvious. But I also had a suspicion that these clothes might have become everyday clothing for many people.

While much of the series was filmed in Liverpool, Manchester and parts of Yorkshire, tourism in the West Midlands has boomed since the first episode aired in 2013. Notable pilgrimage sites include the Black Country Living Museum (the filming location in Charlie Square) and Digbeth Lock in Birmingham, the studio complex founded by Knight where much of the new film was filmed.

In the UK, the series is credited with helping Arthur, the name of Tommy’s older brother, become one of the most popular boys’ names – taking fourth place on the list in 2024 – while Ada, the name of their sister, entered the top 100 girls’ names in 2018 for the first time since the 1920s, and has now reached the impressive heights of 56.

In Afghanistan last year, four men were ordered to report to the Taliban’s Vice and Virtue Department to dress up as characters from the series. They have since been released, with Saif al-Islam Khyber, a spokesman for the Taliban government, telling the BBC: “Even jeans were acceptable, but the values ​​in the Peaky Blinders series go against Afghan culture.”

One division of the Ukrainian National Guard is called the Peaky Blinders because of the Peaky-esque baker’s boy hats they have adopted. To show their support upon hearing from them, Knight sent over 30 new hats and signed one. Cillian Murphy signed another.

For Knight, the moment he realized there had been a major shift in the scope of the show was when he received a call from Snoop Dogg’s agent. “He said, ‘Snoop’s in London. He wants to meet two people and you’re one of them.'”

For three hours in the hotel bar, the pair traded similarities between Peaky Blinders’ time and Snoop’s time with the Crips street gang in Long Beach, California. Brad Pitt also contacted Knight wanting a role in the series, but unfortunately that never happened.

Once the show ended, Knight and his crew were not short of work. Murphy won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Oppenheimer’s film. Knight has just finished the script for the new James Bond film. (When I ask him about it, that’s the only time he’s silent. “I honestly can’t say anything about it,” he says. “Not at what point it’s at, whether I’m done with it, nothing. Let’s just say I’m in the process. I love it, and I don’t feel any pressure. How can I? If I’m worried about it, I’m stuffed.”)

So why revisit Shelby and company? It seems that the work is incomplete. Motivation for one last job.

“I’m very proud of the TV series, and if you’re going to make a movie, the story has to have a reason to exist,” Murphy says.

Knight agrees, but adds that he always envisioned Peaky ending up — as everyone involved with the show points out — on the big screen. (Although the franchise will actually continue on television, a new 1950s spin-off film is now being filmed.)

The star and writer, along with director Tom Harper, whittled down the plot, while Murphy texted the actors to get them into the film. After Keoghan came Ferguson, with whom he shared an agent, to whom Ferguson says she instructed: “‘Just give me a shooting schedule – I’ll show up, I’ll shoot, see what I can do. I’ll do anything!”

Then Roth, who called Murphy in the wake of his Oscar win to congratulate him “and all that crap.” Roth’s character, contrary to expectations, is “very reasonable, and just trying to end the war by any means possible. The term ‘geography teacher’ came to my mind quite often,” he says proudly. “I hated geography but I loved my teacher.”

IIn November 2024, she went to the filming location at Calke Abbey, a National Trust property on the outskirts of Derby, which served as Tommy’s home. It had snowed the previous days. You might think it’s a dream for Knight, who has long wanted to shoot Tommy outside in the snow. He says that in each of Peaky’s six seasons, he wrote such a scene, only to have them all downgraded from snow to rain by producers keen to pad their budget.

But the actual material, unfortunately, was the wrong type of snow, meaning it had to be removed by production staff, before being added back in during post-production.

It wasn’t just the weather that brought headaches. Calke Abbey’s Grade I listed status meant that there were strict restrictions on what could happen during filming. Producer Jay Healy told me that navigating those rules was part of the fun, while sounding like a guy who’s had enough of that kind of fun.

The monastery was in the middle of a renovation during filming, which also didn’t add to the comfort levels. “That place was so frozen,” are Murphy’s main memories of Derbyshire.

Watching him film a scene at Tommy’s writing desk was extraordinary. During the reset, Murphy stayed in character for what seemed like an age: thinking, repeatedly removing and replacing his glasses, and smoking hard for about 15 minutes while the cameras moved around him. He was mesmerizing.

Returning to the role was “like putting on an old pair of shoes,” he says. “It’s more than just wearing the hat, I always have to spend a few months getting into that mindset, getting in shape and all that. And there’s always a boatload of words…

“It’s been a quarter of my life, Peaky Blinders, so I’m okay with that. As for the haircut: I hated it for a long time, but then everyone in the world started getting it, so I thought maybe it’s not so bad after all?”

At some point, I pulled into the costume trailer stationed in the monastery parking lot. Among the rails and bars of the elaborate suits, coats, and leather jackets, I saw a safe marked with a key. It turns out that this is where Tommy’s hat is kept when Murphy isn’t wearing it. Now he won’t need her anymore, I wonder where she is?