Peaky Blinders Creator Steven Knight Wishes He Never Killed Four Characters

Creator Steven Knight has sent a handful of characters into the bleak midwinter through every season of “Peaky Blinders,” but even he admits that there were some he wished he could have kept around a little longer.

In an interview with Esquire during a live watch-along of the season 5 finale, the showrunner of the beloved period drama shared a few select names of stars he’d have preferred to have held on to. One name at the top of the list was Aberama Gold, played by Aidan Gillen. Appearing in season 4, the hitman hired by Tommy to eliminate Luca Changretta (Adrien Brody) became close with the Shelby family after getting engaged to Polly (Helen McRory), only to be stabbed to death during an ambush by the IRA. Looking back, Knight felt Gold was made of sterner stuff. “I should have kept [Aberama] alive; I could have just wounded him.”

Another talent that was snuffed out too early on the show was future “Shogun” star Cosmo Jarvis. He joined the series in season 5 and was just one shot away from taking out the show’s major villain at the time, Oswald Mosley (Sam Claflin). “There’s him playing Barney Thompson (Cosmo Jarvis), who’s just brilliant, and I really wish I’d kept him alive now because he’s such a good actor,” Knight admitted. 

Among all the characters who were killed off during the reign of the Peaky Blinders, though, it was Tommy Shelby’s first nemesis that Knight fought against the most.

In the case of killed-off characters, Knight revealed that some needed to be removed simply because the story demanded it. “The other one is Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, who played Malacki Byrne and it’s quite a small part, but he just took it over, and he was brilliant,” said Knight. “But sometimes you have to do it because the story has to move on, and there’s obvious examples of characters who’ve gone.”

But the character that Knight had the most trouble parting with was Sam Neill’s psychopathic character, Inspector Campbell, who haunted Tommy for two seasons and saw the two share some intense scenes together (which Cillian Murphy referred to as a “great problem”). “A great one was Major Campbell, and I thought we’d got to the end of that duel between Tommy and Campbell and I was writing episode six of that series and I thought ‘I can’t just send the script to Sam Neill.'” Eventually, the time came when the showrunner had to make the difficult call. “So, I phoned him up explained and he just said, ‘I don’t want to die’ so I said ‘OK, I’ll think about it,’ and did think about it and then a week later said ‘I think we’ve got to do this,’ and he was fantastic about it,” Knight recalled. “But it’s a funny position where you create these people and then you have to kill them, and it’s not nice.” We can only wait and see who is next for the chopping block when the “Peaky Blinders” movie, “The Immortal Man,” reintroduces us back into Tommy’s wicked world and into theaters.