Anyone who’s watched even five minutes of Peaky Blinders, Steven Knight’s slick and gritty crime drama, the final series of which airs on BBC One this month, knows that the gang’s leader, Tommy Shelby, has a fair bit on his plate. There are rival gangsters, Fascist politicians, police informants, Irish separatists and of course his immediate family – and the odd spectral vision or two – all vying for his attention. It looks, let’s be honest, exhausting.
And apparently playing Tommy is exhausting, as these exclusive extra quotes from Esquire’s new interview with Cillian Murphy, cover star of the current issue, reveal (see the full story and shoot here). “I’m always fucking thrilled to be finished every series because he’s so relentless and tiring to play, and you have to go to all those really dark, ambiguous places,” Murphy said, during a day with Esquire near his home in the suburbs of Dublin. “I’m always just delighted to come home and have a nice boring existence.”
In fact, Murphy had a somewhat novel suggestion of how to cut Tommy could some slack: “If you think about it, Tommy never wakes up and has an average day. He wakes up and some catastrophe befalls him everywhere he goes, and people are always trying to fucking kill him. I used to joke that we should just shoot one day where Tommy wakes up and… nothing. He misses a package or something. But it never happens. I mean, I guess that’s drama, isn’t it? Nobody wants to see someone wait for a package.”
The final season of Peaky Blinders will air on BBC One in February. The Spring edition of Esquire is out now
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