I’ve fallen woefully behind with the fifth “season” of Peaky Blinders, and have only just seen the third episode… which [NO SPOILERS!] opened with a scene starring Kate Dickie as the overbearing “Mother Superior” of an orphanage, visited by ‘Tommy’ (Cillian Murphy) and ‘Polly’ (Helen McCrory), for reasons I won’t go into. Sadly it was an isolated, one-off appearance, so she didn’t get to reunite with her Game of Thrones co-star Aidan Gillen, who plays Gypsy hit-man ‘Aberama Gold’ in this series, or her co-star from The Witch, Anya Taylor-Joy, who has just been introduced as ‘Michael’s (Finn Cole) feisty American girlfriend. Still, it’s always nice to see Dickie on screen again, and great to see that Taylor-Joy’s career has really taken off since her run-in with Black Phillip…
While I’m belatedly calling out cool cameos in critically-acclaimed BBC period dramas, I should also mention Sofie Gråbøl’s casting as the Danish ‘Queen Marie’ in ep #1.8 of Gentleman Jack (still available to watch on iPlayer for another 9 months). It took me a couple beats to recognise her without the iconic jumper, but I did get a warm fuzzy feeling remembering how much I used to “stan” ‘Sarah Lund’, back in the day. Sigh…
