Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man spoilers ahead.
The much-awaited Peaky Blinders movie The Immortal Man ticks the boxes that fans of the series may hope for: an excellent soundtrack, adrenaline-filled battles and ample amounts of brooding from Cillian Murphy’s now-retired gangster king, Tommy Shelby.
But while a huge part of the film’s heart is centred around Tommy’s ultimate fate and potential redemption, as well as Barry Keoghan’s introduction as his badass son Duke, the key plotlines of The Immortal Man are carried by interesting and complex female characters.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been as pleasantly surprised about this as I was. After all, the late and so great Helen McRory’s portrayal of Aunt Polly in the series will go down in history – from her iconic furs to her icy stares and general way of manipulating and ruling a family full of (read: male) trauma, egos and violent tendencies.
©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection
In a 2016 interview with The Independent, Helen spoke out about the importance of bringing nuance as well as power to female screen roles. “To fill the screens with women who are walking around in six-inch stilettos and telling everyone what to do is as uninteresting to me as filling them with bimbos in bikinis falling into pools and laughing at your jokes,” she said. “Neither are particularly interesting.”
Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight has also spoken out previously about not needing to “invent” strong women to feature in the series. “Having come from a working-class background, and in Birmingham, the women run the show,” he said. “It was never a question of saying, ‘I’m going to deliberately put some strong women in it…’ It was more like, ‘just look out the window,’ you know, ‘look at what really is happening.’”
He has also described wanting to “do justice” to the women who stepped up, worked and kept the country going during WW1, and were baffled and angry at being told to step away from their jobs once the war was over. The series’ executive producer Caryn Mandabach also told the BBC that “we’ve always passed the Bechdel Test”, which assesses the representation of women on screen.
PHOTOGRAPHER:,Robert Viglasky