Steven Knight: ‘I wanted to make the Birmingham accent sexy with Peaky Blinders’

(Picture: Getty)

‘A surprise, a shock, an absolute pleasure and unexpected’ is how Peaky Blinders’ creator Steven Knight describes it feeling, watching the TV show becoming a true global phenomenon.

Starring Cillian Murphy as the fearsome titular gang from Small Heath’s leader Tommy Shelby, the series has moved from BBC Two to BBC One and now to Netflix, which is directly involved with producing new follow-up feature film, The Immortal Man.

And after a run in select UK cinemas, it’s now hit the streaming platform.

For the Birmingham-born writer, 66, it’s been an incremental process he’s been able to track through various friends and family members’ holidays to Spain, Buenos Aires and China, all of which featured a Peaky Blinders-themed bar.

‘The idea that it’s gone really around the world, to places you wouldn’t expect – a few months ago in Afghanistan, some young men were arrested for being dressed as Peaky Blinders – for me, it’s felt very personal, because it was about Birmingham, and was about my family and stuff like that,’ Knight explains.

‘What it does do for me, ultimately, is it gives me confidence that you can do something that is just what you think is good – and if you’re lucky, the world will agree.’

(Picture: Robert Viglasky/Netflix)

And the world has agreed plenty with Knight since then, as the man recently picked to pen the latest James Bond movie, to be directed by Denis Villeneuve, after the successes of his other popular programmes like SAS: Rogue Heroes, A Thousand Blows and – most recently, also for Netflix – House of Guinness.

The Immortal Man also reunites Knight, Murphy and other original cast members like Sophie Rundle with director Tom Harper, who helmed some of Peaky’s very first episodes in 2013 and is delighted to finally return.

‘It meant that when I came back, we already had this sort of springboard from which to catapult us into the movie,’ Harper shares, who directed the likes of The Woman in Black: Angel of Death (starring late Peaky alumna Helen McCrory) and 2019’s The Aeronauts.

‘Peaky Blinders has exploded since what it was then, and so to get the opportunity to come full circle and tell this chapter in the life of Tommy Shelby as a film, and fulfil some of the ambition and the cinematic quality that we always had in the series, but as part of this, at this at this point, is wonderful.’

New cast members for the movie, reflecting Peaky’s pedigree, include Tim Roth, Rebecca Ferguson and Barry Keoghan.

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(Picture: Getty)

A proud son of Brum, Knight is delighted to have both re-invented Birmingham’s reputation among the British and promoted its profile worldwide.

‘People from Birmingham tell me that when they go abroad and they start speaking, people say ‘Peaky Blinders’ as the first thing, which is great! I remember saying to one of my brothers, “I’m going to try and make the Birmingham accent sexy,” and he said, “Good luck with that!” But, you know, I think Cillian manages it.’

The Irish Oscar winner ably manages the notoriously tricky accent, when the same can’t always be said for his co-stars, and told Metro he was also determined to make it ‘cool’ rather than the butt of jokes – which is something Knight has also managed for the city as a whole.

‘That’s one of the things about the whole process that I’m very proud of,’ he adds.

Tommy is, to all intents and purposes, a villain – he intimidates, beats and even kills many people while leading a gang that hides razor blades in the peaks of their trademark flat-caps (historians classify this as urban myth, but Knight disputes this, citing family testimony).

But audiences nevertheless adore him.

(Picture: Netflix/Everett/Shutterstock) (Picture: Netflix/Robert Viglasky)

‘I always think of him as a good man doing bad things for a good reason, or at least a reason that he believes he’s good. So I think as an audience, you can empathise with him,’ muses Knight. ‘But I find it astonishing; I remember watching a scene where Arthur [Tommy’s troubled brother, played by Pau Anderson] attacks a completely innocent Quaker with a razor blade, and it’s completely unprovoked. And the person I was watching with said, “Oh, poor Arthur!”’

Peaky Blinders sits in the grey area, where two things can be true at once, agrees Knight.

‘For example, in the first series we had Campbell, who was just judgement – judging everything that everybody did – but he was a baddie. He was right though, all the things he was saying were right, but he was the baddie.’

‘It’s important if the drama can explore how people have broken, the trauma that they go through, the violence that they’re subjugated to, and they then pass on to other people. That’s interesting, you know?’ Harper adds.

From the intensive research Knight has done for Peaky Blinders across the years, which has spanned 1919 and the aftermath of World War One to the dark days of the Blitz in the 1940s now with The Immortal Man, he classifies what his father and uncles told him as the most important aspects for shaping the Peaky universe as a whole.

(Picture: Robert Viglasky/Netflix) (Picture: Dia Dipasupil/WireImage)

‘My dad telling me about running barefoot when he was about eight years old with a message for the Peaky Blinders – knocks on the door, door opens, smell of cigarette smoke and whisky, and there’s a round table covered in money and seven men dressed immaculately with razor blades and guns, drinking whisky out of jam jars. And it’s just that thing that here are men who will do everything for their appearance, but they won’t buy any glasses or cups! That, for me, is research.’

Knight knew ‘from the beginning’ that he wanted to tie up the Peaky Blinders – or at least, this generation – during World War Two, given Tommy’s ongoing struggles with the previous war, even if specifics changed over the years.

‘When you get into the Peaky spirit, lots of stuff comes. But I think in the end, when the cast started coming together, and when we knew we’d got Tom – every series since series one the first question was, can we get Tom back? And he was always busy – that’s when you start to think more we can be quite expansive.’

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is now streaming exclusively on Netflix.

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