In the series Peaky Blinders, we never see his hero Tommy Shelby eating. His interpreter Cillian Murphy explains why.
Season 6 of Peaky Blinders, available on Netflix since June 10, marked the end of the thrilling and tragic story of the Shelby family. And in six seasons, fans noticed that the leader of the clan, Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), was far too busy to perform a vital activity: eating.
Indeed, we never see Tommy Shelby in the process of sustenance in the series. We had to wait six seasons to have an explanation from Cillian Murphy during an interview for BBC Radio 1. He reveals that he never really realized that his character didn’t eat on screen.
A desired feature
It hit him after the first two seasons and he decided with showrunner Steven Knight to make it a norm, almost a “running gag”:
“I remember, we had finished the first two seasons, and then I realized that Tommy had never eaten, that we had never seen Tommy eating. We see him at a table, but he never ate a single piece of food. So we made it kind of a running gag. So during the 36-hour series, Tommy Shelby never eats anything, except I think once when he eats a sprig of mint when he is with his son.
So these things develop when you have the luxury of playing a character for so long, these little things come up, and I was discussing that with Steven. I would tell him to take this or that, and then we take it and we go with it.”
Fans got their eyes on it as early as 2017 when they saw that the Peaky Blinders frontman never ate. And his interpreter Cillian Murphy has therefore confirmed this characteristic of his character, which was not intentional at the origin but which ended up becoming so. At the same time, Tommy Shelby is so busy that he doesn’t have time to eat or really sleep. On the other hand, he has plenty of time to drink whiskey, an activity that we see very often in the series.