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Louise Thomas
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Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight has revealed how rapper Snoop Dogg changed his view of the award-winning series.
Starring Cillian Murphy as gangster and businessman Tommy Shelby, the show came to an end in 2022 after six seasons, and is due to be released as a movie in 2025.
Although it boasts an impressive fandom of famous faces including Barack Obama, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, and Tom Cruise, Knight says it was the “Drop it Like it’s Hot” musician, Snoop, who made him realise how big the show actually was and the cultural impact it had had on people from all backgrounds.
In an interview for the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, Knight revealed that the rapper said the show had reminded him of “how he got into gang culture”.
“It was all about family keeping you in, and escaping from family to do the bad stuff, and then the family relocating their emotions and loyalties to follow you, and then escaping again,” he explained.
“It made me understand that there is something in Peaky that is pretty universal. He was such a great bloke. He was so nice to talk to.”
Knight, who based Peaky Blinders on his working-class upbringing in Birmingham, said the conversation brought home the universal nature of the show “with people from Eastern Europe to Buenos Aires getting it and feeling the same thing.”
The writer has previously spoken out about the portrayal of working-class lives, saying that they can be “glamorous and beautiful” and are not to be pitied.
The 64-year-old told the Radio Times earlier this year that he was eager to get the portrayal of both place and community right in his new BBC drama This Town.
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“As with Peaky, the first thing I said to the directors was this isn’t: ‘What a shame, these poor working-class people!’ This is beautiful and glamorous - it’s the Wild West, it’s mythology.”
He continued in praise of urban spaces: “If you live at the top of a tower block you can see the whole world, you see the curve of the Earth. Look at those places with a certain mindset and they’re bloody gorgeous.”
Working together with series director Paul Whittingon, who also directed The Moorside starring Sheridan Smith, the pair worked to capture the energy and spirit of working-class spaces including housing estates.
