For more than a decade, Cillian Murphy has been one of television’s best antiheroes, Thomas Shelby on Peaky Blinders. His icy glare, clipped and measured tones, and his presence as an entity are so well established and deeply rooted that it’s easy to believe the character was born fully formed.
However, Murphy has said in his recent interview surfacing on social media, that these now iconic traits were not initially devised but rather gradually evolved as a result of performing, writing, and collaborating in the long term.
Read on to know what exactly he said about his character’s peculiar mannerisms.
Cillian Murphy opens up about how he got into the mannerisms of” The Peaky Blinders
Cillian Murphy, who plays Thomas Shelby in The Immortal Man refelcts while speaking about how his character traits and mannerisms actually evolved.
“No, it kinda evolved over the course of the series. It’s like, we shot at the end of 2012, which was insane.”
What he means is that when Peaky Blinders began, he and the rest of the creative team hadn’t quite fully locked down the aspects that would define Tommy Shelby as a character. Instead of playing the part as though it were a done deal, Murphy allowed the character to take shape organically, responding to scripts, direction, and his own instincts as the show took form. He then moves on to describe the construction of Tommy, mentally and physically:
“He was a decorated War veteran, so you had to use all the tricks to kinda drop the voice a little bit. In the tailoring of the suit, the silhouette, the cap, the ciggerattes that happen because it used to be to my lips, so then you began to roll it.”
His lower, more controlled voice reflects both his past as a soldier and his emotional restraint. It isn’t solely an aesthetic choice; it’s a signal of a man defined by violence and discipline who seldom lets emotion openly surface.
“All of that, and it’s the gift of doing something for a very long time. You know you’re doing a film, and you are in and out. Even if it could be like three months of something.”
Unlike film roles, which are typically done in a matter of months, a long-running series like Peaky Blinders provides an actor the opportunity to return to and evolve a character multiple times. Murphy states that the longer involvement allowed him to try out different things, bring in small changes, and add layers to Tommy Shelby that you couldn’t really do in a shorter project.
“There is something that you can go back to in and out of over the course of a career. Then you get a bit confident with it, and you get to go a bit deeper. The writer gets a bit more confidence, and filmmakers get a bit more confidence, and the thing begins to evolve and get richer if you are lucky.”
Therefore, with the show becoming successful, creator Steven Knight and the rest of the Peaky Blinders team could take greater creative risks, pushing Tommy into darker, more complex arenas. Murphy’s increasing confidence was reflected in his ability to delve into more nuanced emotional nuances and contradictions in the character.
That progression is what made Tommy Shelby so mesmerizing in Peaky Blinders over the years. He was never static; his gestures, silences, and even his body changed with the states of his inner world. Now, by the time of The Immortal Man, Tommy is the man who has been there and done that all too much, and every twitch reflects how tired he is, and he has more blood on his hands than he’s had frowns, and he’s got a soul suffocated behind that grimace.
Edited by Tanisha Aggarwal