By If you take Peaky Blinders as your historic guide, you'd think that 1920s Birmingham was the Wild West, multiplied by the more splattery end of Tarantino's oeuvre, to the power of Guy Ritchie.
Now Helen McCrory, who plays Aunt Polly, says that the new season is so "disgustingly violent" that she couldn't actually watch it at last month's premiere screening.
"I’ve only seen episode one, and there's a whole bit… We saw the screening in Birmingham, for fans who managed to get lottery tickets," she told Metro. "I look away from the screen. I, as Helen, can’t watch it. I think it's disgusting, gratuitous violence. It is… no, not gratuitous - disgustingly violent."
Not that she thinks that's necessarily against violence per se.
"And it should be [disgusting]," she said. "I think it's much more disturbing than somebody slashes somebody’s face or somebody shoots somebody and it's all just the end of it."
Plus, McCrory says you're not really meant to empathise with the people doing the slashing, booting and crunching.
"It is not a natural state of affairs," she said. "And anybody who looks at the violence of Peaky Blinders and thinks: 'That exactly is what I want to do'. I mean, sick."
Cillian Murphy touched on the violence of Peaky Blinders in a recent chat with the Guardian too.
"I don’t believe anything should be gratuitous," he said. "We’ve always talked about there being consequences of violence – I hope that it is made to look ugly and makes you flinch or turn away. We are working within the limitations of the gangster genre and things are heightened, and that is part of its appeal, so I suppose it’s balancing that. You see the psychological trauma that Tommy suffers throughout the new series, particularly."
Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox
