Peaky Blinders' Steven Knight: ‘Lawlessness always catches one's eye as a writer'

Telegraph

16-02-2025

Steven Knight is the creative genius responsible for making the hit television shows Peaky Blinders, SAS: Rogue Heroes and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (among many others). So it comes as something of a surprise when the writer/director/producer ­admits that he seldom sits in front of the small screen himself.
'I don't really watch stuff,' he says. 'I find it quite hard work to watch: not because it's bad, but because I'm constantly thinking about how they're doing this, how the writer is doing that, or why they're doing something else. And sometimes I think, 'Why can't I do that?'' Knight mainly tunes into live sport, especially the games of his beloved Birmingham City FC. 'And that's it, really.'
For someone who doesn't watch much telly, he sure knows what the viewing public wants. Millionaire became so popular globally that it made Knight (and his co-creators David Briggs and Mike Whitehill) life-changingly rich, while the ­second series of Rogue Heroes has been one of the best shows so far this year.
And, of course, there's Peaky. Since the series debuted in ­Sep­tember 2013, the exploits of ­Bir­ming­ham's foremost crime family have become one of the most popular and recognisable hits of this century, and it has made superstars of its cast (including Cillian Murphy and the late Helen McCrory).
While he was researching the real-life Peaky Blinders – who terrorised the Second City during the Victorian and Edwardian periods – Knight came across the Forty ­Elephants, an all-female crime gang operating in London around the same time. 'It was women-only, and their profession was ­confidence tricks, and mass invasions of Harrods and Selfridges to steal stuff. They were the most lawless, uncontrolled force in London,' he says. 'And I just thought, this is such a remarkable story. If one were to invent the Forty Elephants, people would say that's just ridiculous.'
While Peaky had the main hold on Knight's attention, the story of the Forty Elephants lodged in a ­corner of his mind, and he has now, finally, dramatised it in A Thousand Blows. The Disney+ series follows the female gang, led by Mary Carr (The Crown's Erin Doherty), who clash with the bigwigs of the murky world of illegal bare-knuckle boxing in 1880s London. 'The thing that I'm drawn to is forgotten or secret history,' says Knight. 'And this absolutely is that.'
The obvious question arises: what is it with Knight and gangsters? 'It's not so much me and gangsters,' he laughs. 'I think it's me and people who take exception to the rules, to authority in various forms... There's always some ­element of lawlessness that catches one's eye as a writer, and it gives you more scope for what naturally turns into drama.'
Knight's fascination with that grey area between the legal and ­illegal can be traced back to his childhood. One of seven children growing up in inner-city Small Heath, he would play truant with his blacksmith father, George, and catch a glimpse of the real Peaky world. 'He'd say, 'Do you want to go to school or do you want to come with me?' We'd go to a warehouse full of stuff. I'd ask, 'Is this stolen?' and he'd say, 'No, Charlie finds it just before it gets lost.' The people I met were such a laugh.' That 'Charlie' line found its way into Peaky.
The first in his family to go on to higher education, Knight took an English degree at University College London and knew he wanted to be a writer. He returned to Birmingham and worked in radio advertising; his break into television came with fellow Brummie Jasper Carrott on the sketch show Canned Carrott, and The Detectives, a police-procedural spoof. Then came Millionaire, and a move into film with Dirty Pretty Things (for which he earned Best Original Screenplay Oscar and Bafta nominations).
We meet in a suite at London's Corinthia hotel, the room's lavish furniture removed save for a pair of chairs. Knight, dressed in three shades of green, is characteristically relaxed; he unthinkingly ­fidgets with a tag that remains on what is obviously a new pair of socks.
While A Thousand Blows is based on real people, episodes carry the disclaimer: 'The following is inspired by real characters who lived and fought together in London's East End.' Why did he want to point out that it isn't a true story? 'Because it isn't, and I don't think fiction ever can be, to be honest. Equally, I don't think history books ever can be, because if you read a history book, you'll believe that whatever actually happened was inevitable,' he says. 'My view is that any historical period is pretty chaotic, anything could happen, and there could be any outcome.' More important for him was to capture the essence of his unfashionable characters, because 'usually, working-class life is not written down anywhere'.
One of the threads running through A Thousand Blows is how hostile Britain can be to immigrants fresh off the boat: in this case, the Jamaican Hezekiah Moscow, who comes to London with dreams of becoming a lion-tamer, but instead ends up forced to become a bare-knuckle fighter. It echoes the small-boats crisis on the south coast today. 'Certain things are eternally true, and certain tensions are always there,' Knight says. 'And the incarnation of Hezekiah arriving in London from Jamaica, and experiencing what he experiences, the same thing's happening. It's a different dynamic, a different reason, but the experience is the same.'
Knight was seen to have pulled off a coup when he convinced Cillian Murphy to reprise his role as gang leader Tommy Shelby for the upcoming Peaky film in the wake of his winning the Best Actor Oscar for Oppenheimer. The Irishman is now one of Hollywood's hottest prop­erties. 'He's still the same bloke,' says Knight. 'When he was getting all his awards, he would text, usually the next morning, and say, 'I can't wait to be on Peaky.' He's not having his head turned.'
But Knight is humble enough not to try to take credit for Murphy's vertiginous rise. 'He would have found his way to that place by another route.' So what makes the actor so ­special? 'Some people have got it, some people haven't. It's a combination of things, but I think the way he looks works on screen. It's just the way he controls the attention of people watching. I'm not sure you can learn that.'
A Thousand Blows sees Knight reunite with another former collaborator, Stephen Graham, whom he cast towards the end of the Peaky TV series and also in the new film. ­Graham, one of the finest performers of his generation, underwent a remarkable five-month physical transformation to play the brutal boxer Sugar Goodson. He needed no direction to get in shape, but he has packed on pounds and pounds of muscle that is, frankly, out­rageous for a 51-year-old.
'He does that himself. If he knows he's playing a bare-knuckle boxer, he's going to guarantee, by the time we start shooting, he'll be a bare-knuckle boxer,' says Knight. 'So he did put himself through an incredible regime. It's his body, but also the look on his face. You just think, 'Oh my God, I'm terrified of this bloke.' Once Stephen's unleashed, he's properly unleashed.' Graham, Murphy and Tom Hardy – another Peaky alumnus – are the best actors working today, he says.
Meanwhile, when we met, Knight was also working on a new Star Wars film, but it has since emerged that he is no longer involved in the project. 'There's a system, and when you engage with it, you know what it is. You do your bit, you turn in your draft or drafts, as I did, and then the system moves on,' he tells me later. 'I fully expect that substantial amounts of what I did will be in the movie – who knows? But that's the expectation.' Relations with Disney, which owns Star Wars, are clearly unaffected, as A Thousand Blows has already been renewed for a second series.
Though he is a few months away from being of pensionable age, Knight, 65, is as busy as ever. January saw the release of Maria (starring Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas), which Knight wrote, while shooting of the Peaky film has wrapped, and he is developing a Succession-style series about the Guinness brewing dynasty for Netflix. And he is the mastermind behind Digbeth Loc, a new studio in Birmingham.
Why does he keep going? 'I can't not do it, is the honest answer,' he sighs. 'People say you must have discipline, but you don't. It's discipline to stop sometimes.'