By Alfie Solomons was a one-off. Tom Hardy's Peaky Blinders character was frequently terrifying but had a soft side too, making him an immediate and enduring fan favourite. Now it turns out that Alfie's inspiration came from an appropriately off-kilter place.
"The Tom Hardy thing was mad, that was a mad thing to happen," director Colm McCarthy told the Obsessed With Peaky Blinders podcast. "He wanted to chat to me about what he was thinking of doing and he had this whole conversation about where he was talking about being a bear.
"And he was like, 'I'm like good bear, and then I'm bad bear, and if I get angry bear, it's like scary bear' – this whole thing.
"And it's raining and the crew are standing there looking at me like, 'What is he doing there in this graveyard, under a tree, having this conversation with Tom Hardy about being a bear?'
"And I was like, 'So you want a beard?' and he was like, 'Yeah.' And I was like, 'Cool, that sounds awesome, that sounds wicked.'"
And lo, wicked it was. Given that we know Hardy didn't really want to leave Peaky Blinders, and that pretty much everyone who watched the series wanted Alfie to stick around for a bit longer, is it beyond the realms of possibility that Hardy might return for a quick dream sequence or a flashback? Fingers crossed.
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