Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight has revealed that Tommy Shelby, the violent gangster played by Cillian Murphy in the hit BBC drama, will become “good” by the end of the show’s run.
According to Variety, Knight opened up about Shelby’s personal trajectory during a masterclass at Canneseries TV drama festival in Cannes. He told the crowd that Tommy will be a different man by the time World War II arrives in season 7.
“[Season 7] will tell a different story, where Tommy Shelby – who begins as this nihilistic, looking-out only for his family person – will be redeemed, and he will become good,” Knight revealed. “I want to take him on that journey from the person we saw [in Season 1], to the person he will become in 1939.”
Season 5 of the show is set to air later this year, so we’ll be waiting a while for Shelby’s personality overhaul. Up until this point, the gang leader’s savage streak has been grounded in his experiences during World War 1, which brought about experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder.
At the discussion, Knight also went into detail about how the creation of Peaky Blinders – which he pitched to Channel 4 about 25 years ago – was driven by a desire to tell working class stories, and mythologise the period between the World Wars in a similar vein to the Wild West.
“The tradition in Britain is if you do anything about working-class people either they are scary or funny or it is a shame, it’s a pity … we must feel sorry for them,” Knight said.
“The experiences I had of working-class life was of people enjoying themselves, having a laugh, having fun, having self-respect; they were in control of their own destiny to an extent, and so I wanted to reflect that. So you had a working-class environment where these people are sort of aristocracy in a way within their own community,” he said.
