Cillian Murphy Revealed the Bizarre Reason Why Tommy Shelby Never Eats in Peaky Blinders
Tommy Shelby, the leader of the Peaky Blinders gang, has never eaten anything across the six seasons of the show — and Cillian Murphy has a funny explanation for that.
In most movies and TV shows, there are some things that just aren’t realistic, but everyone ignores them for the sake of art. They are merely overlooked or willingly sacrificed; they can be incidents or running gags. Either way, you don’t typically expect every single series to give you a “slice of life” experience, do you?
Sometimes, however, these unrealistic details lead to funny consequences — and even become part of the show on purpose after they are discovered. This is exactly what happened in Peaky Blinders when, two seasons in, the crew suddenly realized that there hadn’t been a single scene where the protagonist would eat something.
“These things develop over the course of the show. For example, I remember we’d gotten through the first two series, and then we realized Tommy had never eaten. We’ve never seen Tommy eat — like, he’s sat down at tables but has never consumed a morsel,” Cillian Murphy shared with BBC Radio 1.
When you find such a stupefying mistake, what do you do? That’s right — you just roll with it and make it intentional for the consequent seasons!
“So then we kind of made it a running gag. So throughout the thirty-six hours of television, Tommy Shelby never consumes anything. Except I think once he consumes a sprig of mint when he’s with his son,” Murphy explained.
We somehow managed to get through the entirety of Peaky Blinders without ever noticing that Tommy Shelby’s running solely on whiskey and cigarettes, and if anything, this just shows how engaging this criminal drama is… But from this point forth, we don’t think we’ll be able to rewatch the series without thinking, “Oh, come one, Tommy, grab a cucumber or something!”
Source: BBC Radio 1 via YouTube