Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
But his alertness, intelligence, and endless capacity for surprise have helped him defy potential typecasting.
Steve Knight was the one who recognized that it might be worth investigating.
He laughed a lot.
He wanted to work with horses.
He was interested in the Communist Party.
But that was all destroyed by the First World War.
It destroyed his sense of optimism.
It destroyed his faith.
It destroyed his belief in authority.
Violence should make you flinch and look away.
They dont just miraculously heal.
They go to a hospital.
Or they die slow and painful deaths that shouldnt be easy to watch.
Violence on a show like this should make you flinch and look away.
And so thats what weve tried to do.
I dropped the level of Tommys voice.
Then theres the cigarettes, of course.
I tried to steal it for Tommy, I suppose.
And the hair, of course, played a part in all this.
We should talk about Tommys haircut.
You get it done for the show, and youre stuck with it for three months.
It must be hard to be incognito with a cut like that.Yeah, but its fine.
I dont generally do wigs.
I think they look phony.
If I see that a character has to wear a wig, I generally wont do the part.
Ive gotten more tolerant of the haircut over the years.
And bizarrely, its become a desirable cut amongst the fashionistas, which is staggering to me.
Its one more sign of how the show has infiltrated the mainstream culture.
WhenPeaky Blindersfans approach you, what do they talk about?Tommys love life, for starters.
Im not bothered by the name of the character.
Its the quality of the writing that surrounds the character.
And I loved working for Chris Nolan.
When he sends you a script, you know its going to be very seriously high quality.
I was thrilled to be onboard and to be on that boat working with people like Mark Rylance.
For me, its not the size of the part.
Its the quality of the part.
That was a real highlight for me for a variety of reasons.
So that was kind of a dream job for me, really.
And it was a very formative experience for me, working with Ken.
And the methods that he employs have informed my approach to acting since then.
What methods are you talking about, specifically?He shoots everything chronologically and actors never receive a script.
I never got a script.
You do a lot of research about your character, his background, and his occupation.
And then the story sort of unfolds in front of you.
And he creates situations where youll receive information in real time as the camera rolls.
So what it does is it makes your performance completely instinctual and nonintellectual.
What is the appeal of that sort of approach?Its just so different.
See, the tendency with actors is, you get scripts and then you pore over this document.
And then have all these ideas.
And you go and do research.
It can become a little academic as opposed to instinctual.
Working with Ken was the purest experience Ive had on a film set.
How do you choose independent Irish productions like that to appear in?
Is it a matter of scheduling?
Do you think about the subject matter?
I dont really care about the scale of it.
Then, after that, its all about whos directing it and whos in it.
But the initial thing is always, across the board, for every medium, the writing.
Are there particular types of scripts that are more likely to excite your interest?Riskiness appeals to me.
Tommy, for example, is a big distance for me to travel.
Because Im so unlike him in every part of my life.
Whereas other characters that Ive played, theyre just a very, very slight adjustment on yourself.
Do you know what I mean?
Where youre just kind of taking your own personality and sort of adjusting it to the scene?
Youve got an ongoing stage collaboration with Enda Walsh.
Now hes one of my closest friends and collaborators.
And I love the danger of his work.
I love the danger of theater.
I love the live nature of it.
It informs the film acting, because you get to act with a different muscle.
In theater, you only have the wide shot.
There is no close-up.
So, inevitably, you have to act with your whole body.
You have to use physicality much more.
And also, youve got to do it every night.
Youve got to do it for three months.
And youve got to be on every single night.
It was far and away the most cited film of yours.Thats amazing.
Did you study romantic comedies when devising your performance inRed Eye?I didnt, actually.
I dont generally watch that many romantic comedies.
I get my comedy from kind of more absurdist kind of stuff than situational comedy.
The simple answer is, that screenplay was a good piece of writing.
Because, again, its that thing of duality and contradiction: you had to basically play two characters.
One who was a seemingly charming average guy that she meets at a bar at the airport.
And then we did the stuff in the airplane, later.
And the airplane, I seem to remember, was a real replica of the plane.
It went through turbulence and all that.
And that was what Wes wanted to achieve.
But Im happy that people feel warmly towards it.
And Im very happy with the show.
It represents a body of work that Im very, very proud of.
But where does he rank?
Im not too concerned about legacy.
