‘Peaky Blinders’ Creator Steven Knight On Playing With History And The Power Of A Good Needle Drop

Steven Knight’s new Hulu gangster series revolves around the intersection of London’s bareknuckled boxing scene and an all-woman gang in the 1880s, which was about four decades before the events of Peaky Blinders.

In A Thousand Blows, we meet the Forty Elephants, led by their “queen,” real-life crime boss Mary Carr (Erin Doherty). She is maneuvering in the same underground world as menacing fighter Sugar Goodson (Stephen Graham), who encounters an opponent like he’s never experienced until now.

We quizzed Knight on what viewers might take from the Elephants’ story in these fraught current times for women’s rights with the writer and producer telling us that he does not “write with the intention of trying to smuggle a message in,” but that “the message is there,” particularly in an overarching story where every character, regardless of race or sex, is working class and struggling to break out. And as with Peaky, this show is a layered snapshot of an era (with fitting storytelling liberties taken) that can be both foreign and familiar to our own.

For more on building the world of A Thousand Blows and the power of a good needle drop, check out the conversation below.

When I heard about A Thousand Blows, I was reminded of how the Shelby women felt like their own gang. You let their voices and struggles and dreams shine, so this new show’s setup feels like a natural progression.

Yeah, I’ve wanted to do this show for a long time, back to when I was doing research into Peaky and discovered the true story, which is remarkable, of the gang who called themselves The Forty Elephants. Their name possibly came from Elephant and Castle, but when they went to Harrod’s and stole so many items of clothing and put them on to steal them, and they walked out, they looked like elephants because they were so big. And the humor of them, the look of them, and the name of them was always very, very beguiling to me.

And then Stephen Graham approached me with this story of Hezekiah Moscow [Malachi Kirby], and again, he’s a true person, someone who arrives in England in the 1880s from Jamaica with a mission to be a lion tamer. This is not stuff you can make up, but instead, he becomes an incredibly successful bareknuckled boxer. And I just thought, that idea was great. The Forty Elephants were in the same city at the same time. Imagine if Mary Carr and Hezekiah Moscow met, and there is no proof that they didn’t, so therefore, it’s possible. That’s what this story is, imagine if that happened.

You just mentioned a “what if” type scenario, but in general, when you choose to take liberties with history, how do you decide what is worth tweaking for the sake of the story?

I always think that what really happened is so remarkable that it almost dwarfs anything that you make up, but when you tell a story with lots of moving parts and lots of characters, sometimes reality takes a turn that isn’t going to work somehow. So I feel fine, as long as the characters are true to who they really were, then I think you can introduce into fiction things that either may not have happened or didn’t happen. And just see how that takes the story. And it’s not really, to be honest, a logical thing that I do, where I sit and think, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if this happened?”

I tend to be led by my fingers when I’m writing, so that when I’m actually writing something, I sometimes look back and realize what it’s about because this stuff has just come when I was writing. And I think that happens when you’re confident that the characters are correct. You sort of feel a bit of freedom to let them talk to each other.

Mary Carr is a closed book for most of this season. When did you decide it was time for that emotional outpouring?

I always think when various characters that one creates, especially when they’ve had incredibly difficult lives, that Mary Carr did have. Her life, in reality, was brutal from the moment she was born. And I think that in my opinion, when someone is in that situation, then the likelihood is, and from whatever records of who Mary Carr was and what she did, that she closed down any sort of trust in other people. And if you show emotion, you’re sort of trusting people to be delicate with you. And to be okay with you. So therefore, I imagine from quotes from her and court cases where she gave evidence, here’s someone who was quite tough, very hard.

And people like that are a bit like Tommy Shelby. There’s a locked door, you can’t get in. And I think that whenever people come across a locked door, they wanna know what’s on the other side. Or a locked box, they want to know what’s inside the box. And where you get given a character like this, who is so closed off and doesn’t let anybody in, I think what you can do then is just choose your moment to open the box a little bit. And it has such an effect when you see someone who gives nothing suddenly give something, it’s like a bomb going off. So I think that’s always a gift when you’re writing something.

The music of A Thousand Blows takes a very different approach than Peaky, which had a lot of needle drops from pop culture, but here, you go with a more score-based approach.

Having a show that’s set in the same world [Birmingham with Peaky], but you have contemporary music, that’s one way of going down that road. With this, we felt that the score could do the same job, but it could feel very contemporary. And I believe that music in film and television is such a powerful thing that people don’t really think about. In other words, if you strip it all back, when you’re watching something, and it feels absolutely realistic, you’re watching it if that’s really happening, but there’s this music, though, with no explanation of where it’s coming from.

We’re just so used to having a score, we’re used to having a piece of music that compliments what you’re seeing. And it’s so powerful, and I believe that when you are writing a scene, and hopefully, you’re creating a particular emotion, it’s only when the music comes in at a certain point that you get permission to cry, for example. That’s what makes you cry is when the music comes in, and it sort of almost overloads the emotion. So I think that it’s an incredibly important secret weapon in the creation of a TV series or a film, which everybody knows about, and we all get it, but it doesn’t get analyzed, I don’t think. Even though it’s quite odd that it’s there at all.

That reminds me: I’ve got a Peaky needle drops list that I’m planning to publish closer to the movie’s release. Do you have a favorite of all time?

Oh, Ane Bruin, “It Don’t Matter Where You Bury Me” [All My Tears].

And here I am being more obvious by elevating Radiohead and Black Sabbath and Nick Cave and Bowie.

Oh listen, they’re all so beautiful, but that particular song shouldn’t have worked, and it really works in the moment that it’s in. And it’s a good example of Peaky music, where it’s not the track that you think is gonna happen, but I find that song so haunting.

‘A Thousand Blows’ is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+.