Rebecca Ferguson opens up about how she approached intimate scenes with Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders movie
In a frant chat, actress Rebecca Ferguson has spoken about how she approached filming intimate scenes with Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.
Rebecca Ferguson has spoken about how she approached filming intimate scenes with Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.
The actress, 42, appears in the feature-length continuation of the hit TV crime drama Peaky Blinders, playing Kaulo Chirklo – the identical twin sister of Tommy Shelby’s former lover Zelda – and has now revealed the presence of intimacy coordinators on set can sometimes make her feel “very uncomfortable”.
Rebecca told the Radio Times: “I think it’s wonderful that we can have intimacy coordinators and sometimes they are needed, but for me, it’s very off-putting and it makes me feel very uncomfortable because I have enormous boundaries and I can verbalise them.
“So we could sit down and say, what do you need to feel safe? What do I need to feel safe? And then she could step out of the scene.”
The Peaky Blinders film sees Rebecca’s character come face-to-face with Tommy Shelby, played by Cillian Murphy, 49, in scenes that bring the two characters into close physical contact.
Zelda previously had a relationship with Tommy and is the mother of his eldest son, Erasmus ‘Duke’ Shelby, played by Barry Keoghan.
Rebecca also described how she approached the filming process with Cillian before shooting began.
She said: “I had called Cillian and asked him how he wanted to work. It sounds so silly, but I said, ‘I’ve studied your sex scenes…’.
“And he went, ‘That’s really weird and awkward’.
“And I went, ‘I know, but bear with me. This is not just a regular sex scene. This is not us getting our kit off, getting on with it, bish bash bosh. This is a moment of release. This is a moment of intimacy, there’s magic’.”
Elsewhere in the same interview with Radio Times, Rebecca discussed what she described as the challenges faced by female actors in the film industry.
She said: “One of the first things to do is to not to let yourself feel undermined.
“When you start thinking that you are not worth more than a male lead star, or a female, then you’ve already placed yourself beneath them.
“If you go on a film set and there is a big male star there you have to project your power as well.”
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is currently showing in cinemas and will be released on Netflix on 20 March 2026.
