Tommy Shelby

Thomas Shelby is the sharp-suited head of a Birmingham gang carved out of the wreckage of the First World War, running betting shops and street rackets with cold precision. He wants more than his corner of Small Heath can give him, and he moves through it all with an unreadable calm that never quite hides what the war cost him.

Cillian Murphy plays him almost entirely through stillness — a long look, a cigarette lit without haste — so that the violence and ambition underneath feel enormous by contrast. The writing gives him a gambler's mind and a soldier's damage in equal measure, and Murphy lets you watch him calculate before you ever hear him speak.