‘Peaky Blinders’: Steven Knight & Caryn Mandabach On Season 6 Opener & What’s Ahead
deadline.comSPOILER ALERT: This post contains details about the Season 6 premiere of Peaky Blinders.. After a long wait, Peaky Blinders is back, just having premiered the first episode of the final season on BBC One this evening in the UK, and after the tragic loss of one of the show’s most important players, Helen McCrory (Aunt Polly), who passed away in April last year.
Show creator Steven Knight and executive producer Caryn Mandabach sat down with Deadline this weekend to discuss the Season 6 premiere, the impact of losing McCrory on a personal and storyline level, and what’s ahead for the Shelby family (yes, there is a movie being plotted).DEADLINE: I’d like to start with Aunt Polly’s fate.
Clearly fate played a role in what happened given Helen’s sad passing. Steve, did you have to go back and start over, or had you already factored Helen’s illness into your Season 6 storyline plans?STEVEN KNIGHT: We knew from series 5 that she was not well, but if we’d started shooting before the pandemic closed us down, she would have been in it, but probably not as extensively as she would have been normally.
Then, as the pandemic continued, we were told that Helen would be able to do less and less. So I was going back and rewriting.
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