Stephen Graham is red-faced and fidgeting in a London hotel alongside Malachi Kirby and Erin Doherty, his co-stars in A Thousand Blows. I explained how my partner had initially dismissed the gritty period drama on account of all the brutal boxing bouts. But after seeing a glimpse of an extremely hench, shirtless and sweating Graham, she decided that she probably would be able to join me in watching after all.
“I don’t know what to say,” says Graham, as Kirby and Doherty tease him. “If that’s what it takes to get bums on seats, I’ll go with it.”
The physical transformations – Kirby says he lost his “lockdown belly” and he looks like a mean, lean fighting machine in the show – took them about six months, training five days a week and eating a diet of chicken, rice and broccoli. Graham, who admits he is an “obsessive person”, continued the training long after filming wrapped. “It’s now part of my life,” he says.
If you thought Graham was menacing as Combo in This Is England or as Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire, just wait until you see A Thousand Blows. He stars as Sugar Goodson, an undefeated champion in the world of illegal boxing in Victorian-era London.
Sugar’s dominance is threatened by the arrival of Hezekiah Moscow (Kirby) and Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall), best friends from Jamaica, seeking a better life in Britain. Hezekiah, younger and fitter than Sugar, is also more than his match in the ring, which sends Sugar into a jealous rage.
Doherty, 32, meanwhile, plays Mary Carr, the pistol- and knife-wielding leader of the all-female gang of thieves the Forty Elephants. Best known for playing Princess Anne in The Crown, Doherty sees the Forty Elephants as akin to the suffragettes. Like their more famous sisters, the Elephants are also seeking emancipation – but using different methods.
The series was created by Steven Knight, the man behind Peaky Blinders and SAS: Rogue Heroes. Like those shows, A Thousand Blows is loosely based on reality. Goodson, Moscow and Carr were all real people, while the shoplifting gang operated in London’s Elephant and Castle area from the 1870s onwards.
You can see every penny of Disney’s budget on screen. It was filmed at The Story Works, a nine-hectare complex in south-west London. For the duration of the shoot – which saw two six-episode series filmed at the same time – A Thousand Blows built a fully functioning slice of Victorian London.
“I’ll never forget walking on to that set for the first time, realising I could go into all the buildings,” Kirby says. “They built the pub, everything.” He was so taken with the atmosphere that he would often go to set on his day off to take even more of it in.
Graham says he has only ever seen this scale and attention to detail on big-budget sets he’s worked on in the US, while Doherty adds that the mix of animals walking around the streets and muddy puddles covering her dresses with dirt almost removed the need to act. “We were just plonked in it and pressed play.”
“I did feel we were doing something special,” Kirby says. “I’ve never been so excited by a job. Usually, I’m terrified that I’m going to have to find a cave to hide in after I’ve finished filming something.”
That does seem unnecessary, given that the 35-year-old’s CV includes the lead role of Kunta Kinte in the 2016 remake of Roots, the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire, and the Mangrove episode of Steve McQueen’s 2020 anthology Small Axe, which won him a Bafta for his portrayal of the racial justice campaigner Darcus Howe.
“Honestly,” he says, “I genuinely think that if something I’m in comes out, I’m not going to work again. I was depressed after I watched myself in Small Axe. I’ve just accepted that I’m never going to see myself like an audience does. I’m always going to look at it through the perspective of whatever it is that’s going on in my head. But with A Thousand Blows, I felt butterflies throughout the entire process.”
The show was co-produced by Matriarch Productions, the company Graham and his wife, Hannah Walters, founded (they are both executive producers of A Thousand Blows, along with Knight and David Olusoga, among others). Graham says they go out of their way to ensure a “no twats” policy on set.
“I’m just going to be honest, there are a lot of twats in this industry, do you know what I mean?” he says, sounding more scouse as he relaxes into our conversation. “There are loads of egos and I really don’t like that. The industry should have changed and with the ethos of our little company we are trying to move it in the right direction. I want people to skip to work.”
The cast did what research they could on the real-life history of their characters. Details are sketchy – in Hezekiah’s case, complicated by the fact that he went by numerous names – but there is a startling photograph of the real Moscow, fists held high, that formed a great deal of Kirby’s understanding. The existence of the photograph, an expensive item in the late 19th century, suggests that he was a man of a certain standing, while newspaper cuttings of his boxing bouts hint at a formidable talent.
In the case of Mary Carr, there is a little more to discern, but Doherty says she tried to ignore certain facts. “It just forms a backbone. Like I know she was arrested for a certain crime on a certain date,” she says, “and I know the Elephants carried out this heist on this date. I found it very freeing having these little bits of information, then it was up to me to flesh it out.”
Graham felt the weight of history when Goodson’s great-great-granddaughter visited the set with her daughters. “They had a look round and I met them,” he says. “She couldn’t really tell us anything about him, but I felt the connection, and that meant I have an obligation to try to play him as honestly as I possibly can.”
A Thousand Blows may be set in the late 19th century, but its central themes are just as familiar in 2025. Themes such as race, gender, class, poverty and migration drive the drama, although its approach is nuanced. For example, in the opening episode at least, no one mentions the colour of Hezekiah’s skin, so much so that viewers may wonder if this is going to be a colour-blind cast period drama.
“There was excitement about being in a show set in the 1800s and playing a black man from Jamaica that hasn’t got chains on him and is not a servant,” says Kirby. “You don’t really see that a lot. He’s a dreamer, which does not mean he’s just a young man dreaming of becoming a lion tamer.”
“This was one of the key elements Steve [Knight] wanted to get across,” Graham says. “We have this perception that there weren’t many black people in London in those days, and if there were, they were enslaved, or being exploited. But Steve is so fastidious with his research, and he learned that it wasn’t so much ethnicity that divided people in the East End, but class.”
Away from their fights in the ring, Sugar and Hezekiah’s interactions allude to them having overcome similar hardships a continent apart. The show suggests that if they weren’t such foes, the characters might be firm friends. Sugar, Graham says, “sees Hezekiah as an equal, but he’s fearful” – that his status as king of the ring is under threat. “That’s where racism really lies, in the deep insecurities that the racist person has.”
I ask if they took any mementoes from the set after shooting wrapped. Doherty said there is something special that she wants to keep once she’s done playing Mary, a ring that looks like an heirloom. As much as she thought about taking it home, she ultimately decided not to tempt fate, while waiting to see whether there will be a series three and four.
Kirby says he stopped keeping items of his characters’ clothing some time ago as it was becoming “unhealthy” and leaving him unable to detach from the role. Instead, he opted to retain a characteristic of Hezekiah’s. “I took his fight. It was something that I personally needed at the time.”
Graham was given an image by the set designers drawn in the style of a Victorian boxing poster, but with his face rather than the real Sugar. “I turned 50 when we were on this job” – he’s now 51 – “so they made the poster and every single person signed it …” he trails off, tears forming in his eyes. Blushes and tears in the space of an hour – talk about range. “Why am I getting like this?” he says, laughing. “So that’s now hanging in my den. It means a lot. It’s a very special thing.”
• A Thousand Blows is on Disney+ on 21 February
