Peaky Blinders made a blinding return to our screens with season six other the weekend, and already viewers have lots of mysteries that need solving. Firstly, what was Tommy Shelby's daughter Ruby saying in Romani? And who actually is Gina Gray's Uncle Jack?
The first episode saw Tommy (played by Cillian Murphy) visiting cousin Michael Gray (Finn Cole) and wife Gina Gray (Anya Taylor-Joy) in Boston, where he's planning to expand his opium supply.
Tommy is hoping to go into business with Gina's Uncle Jack; an Irish-American businessman who is the head of the Nelson family and a politician, balancing mainstream power with criminal underworld activity. Tommy plans to work with him on drug shipments across the pond - supported only by the fact Uncle Jack is boarding a ship to the UK with a plan to buy Scotch and Irish whiskey import licenses. Actor James Frecheville will be taking on the role.
Who could Uncle Jack be based on?
Reports say Joe Kennedy Senior made a similar journey from the US in September 1933, to purchase the rights to import British alcohol brands to America. He was also a business man and politician from Boston, and father to future president JFK and Senator Bobby Kennedy.
"I'm not giving that away so soon," Steven Knight replied, when asked about the connection to Joe Kennedy Sr by Den Of Geek. "As ever with Peaky [Blinders], you look at history and you take real facts and fictionalise them. There is a resonance with Boston, with senior politicians..."
He added, "The best you can do as a writer is to take what really happened, which is always beyond anything you would dare invent, and then use that. And what really happened in the 1930s with these powerful people, is something that, as a writer of fiction, you wouldn’t dare to create because it’s so insane. So it’s trying to take some of that madness and chaos of reality and put it into the story.”
Inteeeresting.
Peaky Blinders continues on BBC One on Sunday 7th March.
