Peaky Blinders: Charlie Murphy takes on Birmingham gangsters
Irish actor Charlie Murphy loses her accent but gains plenty of respect as she takes on Birmingham gangsters.
As much as it’s known for its flat caps and fashion-forward haircuts, and Cillian Murphy’s menacing blue-eyed stare, Peaky Blinders is notorious for its bombastic cinematography, setting the bloody gangland scraps of early 20th-century Birmingham to contemporary music with a particular visual flair. But it takes a big character to pull off a slow-motion entrance, and that’s exactly what new arrival Jessie Eden, played by Charlie Murphy, does.
“I know,” Murphy says incredulously of her first appearance on screen in the opening episode of series four, a strident, stretched-out march through one of gangster Tommy Shelby’s factories. “I was just trying not to fall over myself, trying to act cool.”
Murphy, 29, joins Game of Thrones star Aidan Gillen and Oscar winner Adrien Brody as the new kids in Peaky Blinders this season. And, though all are stepping into fantastically entertaining roles, Murphy’s is one of the liveliest. “Yeah. She’s a ball-breaker. So much fun.”
Jessie Eden was first mentioned in season three, when the women of the show followed her out on strike. Like Winston Churchill and Billy Kimber before her, Eden is one of the few characters in Peaky Blinders to have existed: a British Communist Party member and trade union leader who led two huge strikes in the 1920s and 30s, when female factory workers downed tools to fight for better conditions. In the show, she causes trouble for Shelby by challenging his policy of paying his female workers less than the men.
The action takes place in the 20s but their dialogue often feels contemporary. “Sadly, it is,” Murphy says. “Hopefully this will shed some light on how long this argument has been going on for.”
The real Eden was a tough person to research, Murphy found, as her legacy has been all but forgotten. “Anything you could find online, I found within the first day,” she recalls. “Then you go down little rabbit holes of blogs, and mentions, and such and such. You’re gathering all these fragmented opinions and bullet points of extraordinary things she did that just aren’t expanded on anywhere.” Murphy and Steven Knight, the show’s writer and creator, put their heads together to compare notes, “and he just did an amazing job of weaving fact and fiction”. One of her earliest scenes sees her defiantly using the men’s toilets because there aren’t any women’s facilities on the higher floors. “It just sums her up completely, by being in a man’s world, literally, and just getting on with it.”
Murphy hadn’t seen Peaky Blinders before she auditioned. “I had sent my tape in and thrown a feather to the wind to see if I would get it or not, then I binge-watched the whole thing,” she admits. “I lost a couple of days.”
After the call came, she swapped her native Irish accent for a Birmingham one, asking the more established cast members on set to chip in if she was doing it wrong.
“Like ‘five’ is ‘foive’, that kind of thing. It’s about drilling it, like learning music. It’s such a strange and beautiful accent when you get it right.” Even though it has been voted one of the least appealing in Britain? “Really?” she marvels. “That’s strange. I love it. But maybe I love it because it’s a challenge as well.”
Murphy grew up in Wexford, in southeast Ireland, the fourth of six children. “I think because there were so many of us we were all left to our own devices at times, so our imaginations are probably a bit more …” she fumbles for the right word, “exercised than others.”
She joined a youth theatre and, as a teenager, discovered the plays of Enda Walsh, Martin McDonagh and Sarah Kane. “That just gave me the fever to want to chase those stories and be in those stories.”
A year after leaving drama school in Dublin, Murphy was cast as Siobhan Delaney in the acclaimed underworld crime drama Love/Hate, which made her famous at home. She won an Irish Film and Television Award for it and was on the show for five years. “It was brilliant because we just bashed them out so fast. It was really compact and intense, then you had the rest of the year to venture into theatre.”
She starred in Walsh’s Disco Pigs at the Young Vic in 2011 and eventually made a permanent move to London, where she shares a flat with two other Irish actors. “It wasn’t the big farewell move, I just kept getting callbacks for things and wasting all my money on Ryanair,” she says. “Even though, sod’s law, the second I moved over, I ended up working for five months in Ireland and paying rent somewhere I hadn’t really lived.”
In the past few years she has appeared on top-notch British TV with solid regularity, usually with an accent somewhere north of Derby. She was in Peter Moffat’s The Village, and played Ann Gallagher in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley. Wainwright then cast her as Anne Bronte in last year’s blustery biopic To Walk Invisible, which involved a shoot on location in Haworth. “So bloody windy and so bloody cold,” Murphy says, laughing.
Why does she keep getting cast as a long-suffering type? “I don’t know! That’s not normally my disposition.” Not many people dare to challenge Tommy Shelby, but Eden does. “I think he realises he’s met his match here with regards to intelligence,” Murphy nods happily. “It’s like a really good chess player being bored, then meeting another really good chess player.”
Murphy’s own next move isn’t clear yet. “I’m on the auditions circuit and don’t know what’s next. That’s the life.”
Peaky Blinders, BBC First, Sunday, 8.30pm