By order of the Peaky Blinders. And by order of the zodiac.

By Gina — GinaStars

I have rewatched Peaky Blinders more times than I should probably admit. Each time I tell myself it is for the plot. Each time I end up watching the characters and thinking about the astrology.

Because the characters in this show are not subtle. They are not trying to be. Thomas Shelby is operating in one very specific mode. Polly Gray is operating in another. Arthur is doing something completely different from both of them and the tension between all three is what makes the show work.

When I started assigning signs I kept having the same experience I have with these exercises. The right assignment is not the obvious one. It is the one where something clicks and you think yes that is exactly it and you cannot unsee it afterward.

Here is what I came up with.

Aries — Arthur Shelby

Arthur is the most Aries character in the show and it is not a comfortable version of Aries to watch.

He acts before he thinks. Every time. The thinking happens after the action and by then the consequences are already in motion. He is the first one through the door whether the door should be opened or not. He runs on rage and love in equal measure and cannot always tell which one is driving.

The Aries quality in Arthur is the rawness. He does not have the control that Tommy has or the strategic patience that Polly has. What he has is force. Pure undirected force that is catastrophically destructive when it has no outlet and genuinely heroic when it finds the right one.

His loyalty is also very Aries. He would do anything for his family without question or calculation. He does not weigh the cost. He just goes. That is both his greatest quality and the thing that has been used against him more than once.

Taurus — John Shelby

John is the Taurus of the Shelby family and the show does not always give him enough credit for it.

He wants the simple things. A family. A home. People he loves around a table. He did not ask to be born into what the Shelbys are and he does not always wear it comfortably. He is steady in the way Taurus is steady — present and loyal and not easily moved — but he also has the Taurus stubbornness that makes him dig in when pushed.

John does not have Tommy’s ambition or Arthur’s rage. What he has is groundedness. He is the one who remembers what the fighting is supposed to be for. The life on the other side of all of it. The Taurus in him wants that life more than he wants the war.

Gemini — Michael Gray

Michael arrives in the show as one version of himself and proceeds to become several different versions over the course of the series. He is the Gemini.

He is charming and adaptable and very good at becoming what the situation requires. He slots into the Shelby operation with a speed that should probably have alarmed people more than it did. He presents himself differently depending on who he is with and what he needs from them.

The Gemini shadow in Michael is the version of adaptability that slides into calculation. He is not loyal the way the Shelby brothers are loyal. He is strategic. He reads people and situations and positions himself accordingly. That is a Gemini skill at its best and a liability when it goes too far.

Cancer — Polly Gray

Polly is Cancer and I will not hear otherwise.

She runs the family from the centre of it. Not from the front and not from behind the scenes exactly but from the heart of it. She is the emotional intelligence of the Shelby operation. The one who knows what everyone is feeling before they know it themselves. The one the family returns to when things go wrong.

Her protectiveness is the most Cancer quality in the show. She will do anything to protect the people she loves. Anything. And she carries the weight of what that has required with a quietness that is somehow more devastating than if she spoke about it.

The Cancer capacity for holding everything together while feeling everything privately is what Polly does for the entire run of the show. She is not the most powerful person in the room in the conventional sense. She is the most necessary one.

Leo — Oswald Mosley

I know. I know. But hear me out.

Mosley is Leo at its absolute worst and I think it is worth naming because Leo shadow is real and the show depicts it unflinchingly. The performance. The need for an audience. The belief that the attention of a room is his natural right. The way he takes up space with complete conviction that the space was made for him.

Leo at its best is warm and generous and leads by making other people feel bigger. Mosley is Leo at its worst which is the version where the warmth is manufactured and the leadership is entirely in service of the ego. He does not shine his light on other people. He uses their attention as fuel.

The contrast between Mosley and a Leo like Anthony Bridgerton is the difference between Leo that grows and Leo that does not.

Virgo — Tommy Shelby

This is the assignment that surprises people the most and is the most accurate.

Tommy is not the obvious Virgo. He does not present as precise or careful or detail-oriented in the way Virgo is stereotyped. But watch what he actually does across six seasons and the Virgo quality is unmistakable.

He plans. Not in an impulsive Aries way or a strategic Leo way. He plans in the specific Virgo mode of thinking through every variable, anticipating every response, running scenarios until he has accounted for as many contingencies as he can manage. He is almost never surprised because he has already thought through most of what might happen.

He is also hard on himself in ways that nobody else sees. The drinking is not weakness in the conventional sense. It is what happens when a Virgo mind that will not stop running finally runs too fast for too long without relief. He holds himself to a standard that he would never apply to anyone he loves and the gap between that standard and reality is where most of his pain lives.

Tommy at his best is the most capable person in any room he walks into. That is Virgo operating at full capacity. Precise, prepared, seeing what others miss. The cost is the never fully stopping.

Libra — Grace Burgess

Grace is Libra and her whole arc is about the Libra experience of being between two worlds and not being able to fully commit to either.

She is elegant and warm and makes everyone around her feel seen. She moves between the world she was sent to infiltrate and the world she actually starts to care about with a quality of genuine feeling on both sides that makes her neither a simple villain nor a simple victim.

The Libra quality in Grace is the constant weighing. Duty against feeling. What she was sent to do against what she has come to want. The balance never quite settles and that unresolved tension is what makes her one of the more compelling characters in the early seasons.

Scorpio — Alfie Solomons

Alfie is Scorpio and he is one of the most Scorpio characters I have encountered in any television series.

He knows things he should not know. He uses information the way most people use weapons. He is unpredictable in the specific way that is not random but rather operates on a logic that other people cannot fully access. He is loyal to exactly the things he is loyal to and the boundary between those things and everything else is absolute.

The Scorpio depth in Alfie is the part underneath the performance. The comedy and the chaos and the rambling speeches are real but they are also a layer. Underneath is someone who has seen a great deal, felt a great deal, and made very deliberate choices about what to let in and what to keep out.

His relationship with Tommy is the most Scorpio dynamic in the show. Two people who respect each other precisely because they recognise in the other the same capacity for damage they carry themselves.

Sagittarius — Aberama Gold

Aberama is Sagittarius in his movement through the world. He operates outside the systems other characters are embedded in. He has his own code and his own loyalties and they do not map neatly onto the structures around him.

There is a freedom to how Aberama exists in the show that is distinctly Sagittarian. He is not trying to build an empire. He is trying to live by his own terms in a world that keeps presenting obstacles to that. His love for his son is the clearest window into his actual values. Underneath the wildness is something very specific about what matters.

Capricorn — Chester Campbell

Inspector Campbell is Capricorn in its most unpleasant expression.

He has climbed. He believes in systems and structures and order and the authority invested in him by those structures. He is methodical and patient and willing to work for years toward a goal. He does not take shortcuts because he does not need to. He has time and institutional backing and a Capricorn’s willingness to do the slow work.

The shadow Capricorn quality in Campbell is the rigidity. The inability to question whether the system he serves is worth serving. He mistakes position for righteousness and authority for virtue. That is what happens when Capricorn’s discipline serves a goal that was never examined.

Aquarius — Luca Changretta

Luca is Aquarius in the specific mode of the person who operates from principle rather than emotion.

His vendetta against the Shelbys is not about rage. It is about honour. About a principle he holds that has been violated and must be addressed. He is cool and systematic and does not let feeling get in the way of the logic of what he believes needs to happen.

The Aquarius quality in Luca is the detachment. He can sit across from Tommy Shelby and conduct what is essentially a negotiation about who is going to die with a composure that is either admirable or frightening depending on how you look at it. Probably both.

Pisces — Ada Shelby

Ada is the Pisces of the Shelby family and she is the one who most clearly sees the human cost of everything the family does.

She feels things that the others have learned to push past. She grieves properly. She gets angry at the right things. She is the one who keeps asking what all of this is actually for and what it is doing to the people inside it.

The Pisces quality in Ada is the permeability. She is affected by what happens around her in a way the others protect themselves from. Tommy compartmentalises. Arthur rages through it. Polly carries it quietly. Ada feels it and says so, which makes her the most honest person in the Shelby family and also the most exhausted one.

Her political work is the Pisces energy finding its proper outlet. The empathy that was a liability in the Shelby world becomes an asset when it is directed toward something larger than family survival.

***

What I find most interesting about assigning the Peaky Blinders characters to signs is how the show demonstrates the same truth the zodiac points at. The qualities that make someone exceptional are the same qualities that create their greatest problems. Tommy’s planning keeps him alive and keeps him from ever fully resting. Arthur’s loyalty makes him indispensable and makes him easy to manipulate. Polly’s protectiveness builds the family and costs her privately for decades.

The signs are not categories of good or bad. They are patterns of energy. What you do with yours is the whole story.

— Gina

GinaStars.com