‘A Thousand Blows’: What To Know About Steven Knight’s Next Gangster Show With A ‘Peaky Blinders’ Connection (Feb. 2025 Update)

Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight remains one of the most in-demand writers and executive producers in the streaming business. He’s currently got multiple projects in the chute, including Netflix and BBC’s Peaky Blinders movie (The Immortal Man), which should arrive later this year. Knight’s House Of Guinness series will also surface on Netflix UK, but that’s not even close to the end of Knight’s projects coming this year.

A Thousand Blows will focus on a different real-life historically reigning gang, the Forty Elephants, as well as the world of underground boxing in 1880s Victorian London. The London-based series will be “based on the lives of real people who lived extraordinary lives in extraordinary times,” but Knight is also known to tweak historical details if that approach makes for a better story. Let’s parse out what we can expect from this show created and written by Knight, who did cast a popular Peaky actor.

Plot

Knight’s Peaky Blinders was known to dabble in boxing matches, and those fights will be both literal (and illegal) but also focus upon characters “embroiled in an epic fight for power in Victorian London.” Hulu shared the above photo of A Thousand Blows‘ Forty Elephants gang, an entirely female crime syndicate who shoplifted, blackmailed, and seduced their targets to gather loot, which they sold while amassing riches.

The gang’s story will overlap with London’s underground boxing scene with Hulu providing the following synopsis:

Inspired by the true life stories of a group of characters battling for survival in the brutal East End of London in the 1880s. Hezekiah Moscow and Alec Munroe, best friends on the run from Jamaica, find themselves thrust into the criminal underbelly of London’s thriving bare-knuckle boxing scene. As Hezekiah finds fortune and fame through the art of pugilism, he attracts the attention of the infamous Queen of the Forty Elephants, Mary Carr, who sets about exploiting his talents to further her criminal enterprise. Meanwhile the menacing and self-declared emperor of the East End boxing world, Sugar Goodson, determines to destroy Hezekiah whose ambitions to fight in the West End threatens everything he has built. What ensues is a battle of the old world against the new.

For a Peaky Blinders connection, Hayden Stagg actor Stephen Graham will soon surface in A Thousand Blows as a very different character, the “seasoned and dangerous” Sugar Goodson, and Graham bulked up significantly for the role. As he told Empire magazine, he hit the training and diet aspects of this job “like a proper athlete” with “five meals a day, loads of protein and constant training.” When he arrived on set, Graham barely knew his own body while observing his daily work:

“I’ve never been that big,” he recalls. “It changed the way I sat, the way I conducted myself. The first day of filming, the director went, ‘Do you want to look at the playback?’ And I remember going, ‘Is that me?!’ I couldn’t believe it.”

No wonder that was the case:

Cast

Stephen Graham is boxer Sugar Goodson with Malachi Kirby as Hezekiah Moscow and Erin Doherty as Mary Carr, head of the Forty Elephants. That gang will be portrayed by Caoilfhionn Dunne (as Anne Glover), Darci Shaw (as Alice Diamond), Nadia Albina (as Verity Ross), Jemma Carlton (as Belle Downer), Hannah Walters (as Eliza Moody), and Morgan Hilaire (as Esme Long).

They will be joined by Susan Lynch (as Jane Carr), Francise Lovehall (as Alec Munroe), Gary Lewis (as Jack Mac), James Nelson-Joyce (as Edward “Treacle” Goodson), Daniel Mays (as William “Punch” Lewis), Robert Glenister (as Indigo Jeremy), Tom Davis (as Charlie Mitchell), and Adam Nagaitis (as the Earl of Lonsdale).

Hulu dropped so many images, including the following:

Release Date

Hulu’s A Thousand Blows debuts with a six-episode first season on Feb. 21. The series will also stream internationally on Disney+.

Trailer

It’s time to get in the ring.