Given that we left Tommy Shelby with a gun to his temple at the end of Peaky Blinders: season five, Esquire was keen to ask the magazine's current cover star Cillian Murphy, ahead of the final series of the cult drama which starts in February, if things might possibly take an upward turn for the nattiest mob boss in Birmingham. Let’s face it, they could hardly get worse (unless it was a very short series).
“Yeah, it doesn’t really get any better, haha!” Murphy told Esquire in these exclusive additional comments (see the cover story and shoot here). “He’s making an effort to reform but circumstances keep slipping out of his control. A lot of it is close to home; in fact, all of the things that really come up in [series] six are from close to home…” Murphy reveals that there’s a “brilliant storyline with Tommy and Lizzy and the kids, that’s really, really strong; I think he’s always super-fragile around them: the idea of ‘If anything happened to the children…'”
Another aspect of the show that will be increased in the final season, according to Murphy, is the sense of otherworldliness: “The gypsy part of it is very strong in this series,” he said. “I’m a big fan of that whole supernatural world that Tommy got from his mother and from Polly – that true line back to something pure, that gypsy tradition. That was probably one of my favourite elements of this story.”
Murphy has played Tommy for close to a decade (and depending on who you ask, may or may not do so in a future film), so it’s understandable that the 45-year-old Irish actor is keen to find new character nuances in Tommy, even now. Including a penchant for hocus-pocus. “For such a rational, no-nonsense man, he believes 100 per cent in all that stuff,” Murphy said. “Which is a great contradiction, a great duality in him that I like.”
The final season of Peaky Blinders will air on BBC One in February. The Spring edition of Esquire is out now
