For 13 years, Peaky Blinders has been quietly building a massive fandom. It’s one of the best shows you’ve probably never seen. As Proma Khosla put it in her Mashable article, “Everyone I’ve ever talked to about the BBC period drama has either never even heard the name, or is obsessed with it.”
Even the creator of the show, Steven Knight, is astonished at the “Peaky Blinders” fandom. When Knight visited our Say More studio to speak with Executive Producer Mark Stetson about the new film Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, he told stories of rap stars Snoop Dogg and A$AP Rocky demanding to meet him to tell them how much they loved the show. His meeting with A$AP Rocky ended up leading to a once-in-a-lifetime Christmas dinner at Knight’s house!
Bringing an epic and beloved story like Peaky Blinders to a close had to be done in a manner that not only honored the characters but also the loyal audience. Luckily, Knight knew from the very beginning how this story would end: “I always wanted to finish this part of the ‘Peaky’ story with a film in the Second World War.” He wanted the full story to span from post-World War 1 to World War 2 to show how those wars affected the often forgotten working class in England.
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Tommy Shelby (played by Cillian Murphy) is the head of the Peaky Blinders, the pivotal character of the series with a fashion sense rivaled only by the American gangsters of the 1900s. We find him at the start of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man having separated himself from the family and the life he once knew. In the conversation with Stetson, Murphy, Knight and co-star Barry Keoghan talk about the incredible moment in the film where Tommy dusts off his legendary suit and becomes the superhero we all remember from the first six seasons of the series.
“He’s like Batman,” Knight exclaimed.
“Even I was cheering, and you were coming to get me,” said Keoghan.
Murphy talks about figuring out the right moment to get Tommy back into his Peaky Blinders kit: “It’s like drawing back the bow, and how long do you keep it taut before you let it go? And then when we let it off, the audience loved it.”
(Watch the full Steven Knight interview on Mashable’s YouTube channel.)
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man will stream on Netflix starting March 20.
