Netflix has dropped the new trailer for House of Guinness, a 19th-century family feud from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. Watch the trailer above and read on for the essentials.
The story
Dublin and New York, 1868: the Guinness heirs discover that the real wake starts when the will is read. Arthur (Anthony Boyle) and Edward (Louis Partridge) are handed the brewery’s future; siblings Anne (Emily Fairn) and Ben (Fionn O’Shea) are cut out. The result is a hornet’s nest of loyalty, resentment and power plays that spills beyond drawing rooms into the streets — amid Irish rebellion rumblings and a dynasty learning the cost of its own name.
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Knight’s angle
“Here’s a deceased father deciding the fate of his children. The will determines the trajectory of each of those siblings. What’s a better place to start a drama than that?” Knight tells Netflix site Tudum. “They all receive whatever they receive. None of them are happy.”
He’s upfront about the stakes, too: “The decisions these characters make about personal issues will have consequences for the future of Ireland, which is quite a burden.”
And on shaping a fiction from history: “There’s no Facebook, no Instagram pages,” he says — so, “What I had to do is take things that these family members did, things that they said, achievements they made, mistakes that they made, and use them as stepping stones. Then I had to fill in the gaps myself.”
The cast and the creatives
Expect gun smoke, politics and stout. James Norton appears as formidable foreman Sean Rafferty; the ensemble also spans Dervla Kirwan, Jack Gleeson, Niamh McCormack, Danielle Galligan, Ann Skelly, Seamus O’Hara, Michael McElhatton, David Wilmot, Michael Colgan, Jessica Reynolds, Hilda Fay and Elizabeth Dulau.
The series comes from production companies Kudos and Nebulastar. It’s created and written by Knight, who executive produces alongside Karen Wilson, Elinor Day, Martin Haines, Tom Shankland, and Ivana Lowell. Cahal Bannon and Howard Burch are producers.
House of Guinness, eight one-hour episodes, will be streaming on Netflix from September 25.
