Yahoo News Peaky Blinders star says "taxing" season 6 inspired him to join The Tower
Emmett J Scanlan has spoken about how a "taxing" stint on Peaky Blinders led him to join the cast of new ITV thriller The Tower.
From the team behind The Serpent, Scanlan joins Gemma Whelan in the gripping police procedural about the investigation into the death one of veteran cop and a rookie cop in an intense chase.
Scanlan accepted the role as police inspector Kieran Shaw in The Tower shortly after finishing work on Peaky's final season and the crime thriller Kin back-to-back.
"[The Tower] was something that I personally needed and I really appreciated because the previous nine months the characters that I was playing were so mentally taxing and exhausting and vulnerable in every capacity," the former Hollyoaks star said. "There's only so much you can do with that before you burn yourself out to a certain degree.
"I didn't feel like I was but it was such a long stint with those two gigs – Kin and Peaky Blinders – that when this came along to play a character like Kieran who was confident and assured and flirtatious – all those qualities that you could really play around with on the other side of the spectrum. It was almost therapeutic for me. I definitely needed it for my own sanity at that point."
The actor also addressed how The Tower did indeed refresh him after doing such similar projects closely together, in Peaky Blinders and Kin.
"First we did Kin, which is beautifully scribed by Peter McKenna but that was five months in Dublin and it was intense. We're talking October 2020 in the height of the pandemic," he recalled.
"We were being tested and whatever went up your nose felt like it was going up into your brain past your tear ducts. Then we went from that onto Peaky's season six. That was, dare I say it, even more taxing for me.
"Thankfully, I was offered this as I was coming to the end of my Peaky stint. I was like, 'Yeah, absolutely. Let's do this.'"
The Tower begins on Monday, November 8 on ITV.
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