From spying on gangsters to falling in love with Tommy Shelby: The evolution of Grace's character in Peaky Blinders is really noteworthy

Actress Annabelle Wallis' introduction as Grace in Peaky Blinders Season 1 was the beginning of her doomed romance with Birmingham gangster Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy).

Like her name, Grace was a positive change in Tommy's life, who adopted a nihilistic approach to life after returning from France during WWI.

However, unknown to him, Grace harboured a dark secret. She entered Tommy's life with an ulterior motive. Hired by Campbell, she was there to spy on the Peaky Blinders and find information about the missing shipment of guns.

While she partly succeeds in her mission, she ends up falling in love with Tommy, which leads to her tragic fate in the show.

More on Grace in Peaky Blinders in our story.

Peaky Blinders: How Grace went from spying on gangsters to falling in love with one?

Grace Burgess was never just a potential love interest to Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders. While she started as this naive and innocent girl with a sob story in the Garrison pub, she was harbouring a dark secret within her.

As she had the whole of Small Heath and Tommy believed, Grace was not here to reinvent her life; she was a secret agent of the Crown, hired by Major Campbell. While she had the whole town fooled, Tommy was able to recognise that she was lying, but he had started to fall in love with her.

She lures him back in with another fake story, and the Peaky Blinders' leader recognises something in Grace. For anyone who believed Grace to be a sweet barmaid, she proved her cunning and managed to enter Tommy's company and soon had access to all Shelby's dealings.

While Grace always believed her to be different than Tommy, as Peaky Blinders Season 1 progresses, she recognises that his darkness parallels the dark motives inside her, since her father's death at the hands of the IRA.

Episode 5 becomes the turning point in Grace and Tommy's relationship after Grace kills an IRA man. While Tommy had instructed her to just point the gun, she revealed that something dark took over her, and she committed the murder.

That was the true moment when Grace recognized that she was no different than Tommy and had fallen in love with the gangster she was meant to spy on. While Tommy's trajectory changed drastically after Grace, she recognized her own darkness, thanks to her involvement with the gang.

Talking about her character and relationship with Tommy Shelby, Wallis discussed in an interview with Deadline:

''I really believe that they [Tommy and Grace] mirror each other in their bravery and their paths less chosen and their moral code that they follow very much suits themselves and their ego and their narcissism and their fight for grandeur and greatness and that makes for a very obsessive relationship.''

Even after many hardships, when Tommy and Grace finally marry, it is clear that Grace holds power over the Peaky Blinders' leader.

While nobody could assert dominance over Tommy, he was starting to become a changed man who wanted to escape the criminal world because of the woman he loved. However, destiny had other plans as Grace dies by a bullet meant for Tommy, and it changes his life forever.

Grace's humble and supposedly moral beginnings started to crumble the moment she met Tommy, and she eventually pays a tragic price for embracing the darkness.

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Also Read: When that iconic line sparked the chemistry between Grace and Tommy in Peaky Blinders

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