Add A Thousand Blows to your watchlist. Series 2 will be available on Disney+ from 9 January 2026
A Thousand Blowsset in Victorian east London, is a lavish production involving dozens of supporting artists, not to mention horse-drawn carriages and tightly choreographed bare-knuckle boxing scenes. So you might expect executive producer Hannah Walters to have found the shoot for series two stressful. But she insists that being on set with her husband Stephen Graham, who plays boxer Sugar Goodson, and Erin Doherty, who plays Mary Carr, the head of a band of female thieves dubbed the 40 Elephants, was full of laughter. “Steve and I work together a lot and he says I do the grown-up stuff,” she says. “But when I’m on set, the grown-up stuff can wait. I want us all to skip into work.”
Walters had the idea for A Thousand Blows after seeing a picture of the third lead character, Hezekiah Moscow, played by Malachi Kirby. “The picture was mesmerising,” she recalls, “so I delved into the history of this guy who’d come to England from Jamaica to be a lion tamer. Then we discovered the Goodson brothers and the Elephants, who also lived in that world.
“I wanted Steven Knight to write it — my Steve had worked with him on Peaky Blinders and other things, so it was a match made in heaven,” says Walters, who also stars as a thief called Eliza Moody.
A Thousand Blows is one of a string of successes for Matriarch, the production company Walters and Graham run together, which also made Adolescence and Boiling Point.
“It’s been a nonstop rollercoaster, a glorious one that we’ve not wanted to get off. But Steve and I are very good at looking at each other and going, ‘We’ve done it, kid.’ It’s a happy marriage and a happy working marriage, and we’re very thankful for it all.”
