Peaky Blinders movie to feature old favourites and new faces
Steven Knight, the man behind the TV hit Peaky Blinders, says the film version will have old favourites and some new faces.
He co-created the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, but Steven Knight’s biggest money-spinning idea has to be the TV series Peaky Blinders.
British writer-director Knight, came up with the hit series about the family of gangsters, starring Cillian Murphy, after stories his Birmingham-based parents told him. Having run for six seasons, filming has begun on a movie for Netflix.
Starring Murphy, Barry Keoghan, Tom Hardy and Rebecca Ferguson, the boys from the bad stuff have certainly come a long way. But despite the soaring success of Murphy in Oppenheimer, for which he won an Oscar, Knight says the Irish actor still has his feet firmly on the ground.
“When touring Oppenheimer, when Cillian kept getting nominated and then winning all of these awards, the next morning, he would always text me and say, ‘I can’t wait to be doing Peaky’,” Knight says, on Zoom from Birmingham.
When the TV show began in 2013, “Cillian was known, but was not a star”, he says. “We were so pleased to have him, because I’ve always thought he’s such a great actor. But, you know, incrementally the show got bigger, and then everyone involved got bigger in terms of profile.
“So, it’s been great that we’re now shooting the film with a new cast as well, with Barry Keoghan, Tim Roth, Rebecca Ferguson and Tom Hardy, of course.”
The movie, which will be out next year, is set during World War II and fans can expect the usual blurred lines between great characters who do bad things, which is the essence of Peaky Blinders, says Knight.
“I’ve always wanted Tommy Shelby to be a good man doing bad things, for a good reason. That, for me, is what drama is,” he says.
“The (Shelbys) did bad stuff, but they think it’s for a good reason. You empathise with these people who are doing demonstrably bad things, but somehow you think, ‘Well, I know why they’re doing that’, which is what I think Peaky has thrived on all along,” Knight, 65, says.
While Peaky Blinders was previously filmed in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, this time it has come back home, in the new multimillion-dollar film and arts studio Digbeth Loc, where the set, including the The Garrison pub, is being built. It’s a passion project nine years in the making for Knight, who says the band UB40 has already moved into the space.
“I’m from Birmingham and Peaky is a story I got from my parents, who told me about when they were kids and their experiences growing up in Small Heath in the ’20s and ’30s,” he says, explaining he wanted to set up a film industry in the heart of the city.
“This is where the original Peaky used to operate. Interestingly, the Montague Street studio was where my dad worked, when it was a corporation yard. He was a blacksmith and shod police horses. He used to say, ‘Do you want to go to school, or do you want to come with me?’ So, I used to go with him. So, for me, it is absolutely part of everything that Peaky ever sprang from,” he says.
But don’t be thinking Brummies are proud of their filmmaking son – or at least, they’d never tell him.
“People in Birmingham are a bit like Aussies, they’re, ‘Don’t get too big for your boots, don’t show off’,” he says. “But fortunately, they love it. Now, when Brummies go abroad and say, ‘I’m from Birmingham’, people immediately say, ‘Peaky Blinders’. It made the accent a bit cool, which is good.”
Next up, Knight, who has written everything from Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart, to the new A Thousand Blows starring Stephen Graham, is tackling a classic, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, this time with Robert Downey Jr.
“Robert Downey Jr is, along with Cillian and Tom, one of the best actors around and he’s keen to do it. He wanted me to write it. So, I’m going to write a contemporary version set in San Francisco,” he says.
“It’s such a stupid thing to do, to do a new version of it, because everybody’s going to say, ‘What are you doing?’ Already they are. But I quite like doing things like that,” he says.
As to the plot of the Peaky Blinders movie, he’s not giving anything away.
“I can’t tell you anything about the plot, but it’s really good, I’ve been looking at the rushes,” he says. “Everybody’s incredibly excited because Barry Keoghan is an incredible actor. I mean, him and Cillian together, it’s amazing.
“We’ve got this incredible cast. I think the story is really good. It’s all set in Birmingham, in the Second World War. I couldn’t be more excited, because it’s my baby, the whole thing. It’s going to be big and it’s also been shot in the place where my dad used to work. What could be better?”
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Originally published as Peaky Blinders movie to feature old favourites and new faces
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