‘Fact is more interesting than fiction’: what inspired Steven Knight to make the new Disney+ historical drama A Thousand Blows
Steven Knight is bringing a new Victorian street gang to the small screen in the form of A Thousand Blows, an upcoming six-part series about the criminal underbelly of the East End of London’s bare-knuckle boxing scene.
Knight is known for the hit show Peaky Blinders, which centered on Birmingham crime gangs during the era, but despite being credited as the creator of the new Disney+ and Hulu series, it wasn’t the screenwriter that originally thought of the idea.
The inspiration for the new series, in fact, comes from an old photograph of the boxer Hezekiah Moscow, one of its actors and producers, Hannah Walters – who portrays the pragmatic Eliza Moody, the second in command of an all-female crime syndicate known as the Forty Elephants – tells TechRadar.
“The picture was sent to me by Tom Miller from Water & Power, which is the other production company alongside The Story Collective [that worked on the series], and it was such a striking image of this beautiful young man in a boxing outfit,” the actor and co-founder of the production company Matriarch Productions that also worked on A Thousand Blows says.
There was just something about it that intrigued me straight away
Hannah Walters, actor and producer in A Thousand Blows
“There was just something about it that intrigued me straight away – that was the catalyst that started the whole journey. Then, digging into research, we found out that during roughly the same timeframe there was the Forty Elephants and the Goodson Brothers as well.”
It was these three real-life stories that ended up becoming the focus of A Thousand Blows. Centered around Hezekiah moving from Jamaica to London with his best friend to become a lion tamer, the show intertwines all three stories through the grimy world of bare-knuckle boxing.
It’s here where the main characters of the show collide head-on, as we see Hezekiah (played by Malachi Kirby) challenge the self-declared emperor of London’s East End boxing scene, Sugar Goodson (Stephen Graham) to a match that ends up dashing his hopes of becoming a lion tamer and sending him into the arms of the queen of the Forty Elephants, Mary Carr (Erin Doherty).
“It was just like ‘wow, we’ve got this tapestry now that we can tap into and bring all these worlds together,” Walters says of the show steeped in rich history, adding that the period drama goes through all walks of life.
Indeed, much of the cast’s most memorable moments from the series were directly taken from historical accounts of the people they were portraying.
Erin Doherty (The Crown) says that when she found out her character’s gang, the Forty Elephants, really did rob Harrods, she couldn’t wait to film a reimagining of it at the department store in central London. “The fact that these women really existed, that they really did have that immense skill to pull something like that off, blows my mind. To be a part of putting that on screen is unreal,” Doherty tells me.
It was the same for Black Mirror star Malachi Kirby, who was completely fascinated by Hezekiah’s story. “You’ve got 1800s. You’ve got London. You’ve got this Jamaican man called Hezekiah, who’s not as a slave, not as a servant, but someone who wants to become a lion tamer and ends up becoming a boxer. I don’t know anyone that could make that up such a specific story in that context,” Kirby says.
[Steven] said once that ‘fact is more interesting than fiction’
Stephen Graham, actor and producer in A Thousand Blows
Unsurprisingly, Knight was taken by the idea when Walters approached him about writing the script for what could be one of the best Disney Plus shows about Hezekiah, Goodson, and Carr – and that mainly came down to his attraction to real-life stories. “[Steven] said once that ‘fact is more interesting than fiction’,” Stephen Graham (Gangs of New York; This is England) divulged.
However, while much of the show is built around history, many artistic liberties were still taken to bring things and characters to life. “There are certain elements of documentation about [Hezekiah, Goodson and Carr], but not loads was known about them. We’re never saying that these three people knew each other when this time existed – they may have walked across the same street – but what Steven has done is beautiful.”
“Each and every one of our characters – all of the members of the Forty Elephants, Alec [Munroe, who’s played by Francis Lovehall] and my brother [Treacle Goodson played by James Nelson-Joyce] – existed, they were real people,” Graham says.
You’ll be able to meet all these characters and see the incredible set of the epic new drama soon enough when all six episodes of A Thousand Blows debut on Hulu in the US or Disney+ in the UK and Australia on Friday, February 21.