Sitting on Zoom with some of the women from A Thousand Blows, it becomes immediately clear that this is a cast that had a whole lot of fun while making the show. The six-part Disney+ series is a brilliant exploration of the dark underworld of boxing in Victorian London and follows Hezekiah and Alec (Malachi Kirby and Francis Lovehall), two best friends from Jamaica who have come to England for a new life and find themselves thrust into the melting pot of Victorian London. Drawn into the thriving boxing scene, Hezekiah meets Mary Carr (Erin Doherty), leader of The Forty Elephants – a notorious all-female gang – as they fight for survival on the streets of London’s East End.

The warmth, humour and love between Erin Doherty, Hannah Walters and Darci Shaw, who play the gang members, is evident within five minutes of chatting with the actors, and it’s infectious to the point that I wish I was one of The Forty Elephants, too. “We have a very active WhatsApp group chat which is, of course, also called ‘The Elephants’, but with emojis,” shares Walters.

A Thousand Blows was written by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders, SAS Rogue Heroes) and stars Stephen Graham as the dangerous boxer Sugar Goodson. But it’s The Forty Elephants who really piqued my interest and made the entire show. This very real gang of women were breaking out of the constraints of the Victorian patriarchy and making their own way in the world. They built a long-running and feared criminal operation based on shoplifting, thievery and heists, and they were known throughout the city for decades.

Alongside Doherty’s Mary, Walters plays Eliza and Shaw plays the young but powerfully confident Alice Diamond. “I’d heard a little about The Forty Elephants before the show but I’d never delved further into it. But once we did, we opened up a whole new world of newspaper cuttings and court transcripts, and we got a pretty good grasp on what was going on at the time,” says Walters. “But like all amazing dramas and real characters, you’ve got that foundation, but as actors, we then build on that.”

For Shaw, there was a lot more to Alice Diamond as she was one of the main figures involved with the Elephants, but later on in the group’s history. For A Thousand Blows, the writers brought her back in time so she could exist alongside Mary and the gang in the 1880s (rather than in the 1920s). “I read a lot about Alice with my mum, and we found reports of Alice in and out of the legal system from the age of 14 and she ended up becoming the gang’s leader at around 19 years old,” says Shaw.

While filming, the cast and crew found that there was a bar called The 40 Elephants in Great Scotland Yard, which includes lots of memorabilia from this period and even has an image of Alice Diamond displayed on the walls. “We went purely for research purposes,” Doherty laughs. The bar also happened to be a couple of doors down from where the show was filming its legendary Harrods heist scene. When I mention this scene to the three women, they all look at each other and start laughing. “We kept on trying to do each take quicker than the last because running up those stairs in a corset is a nightmare,” Doherty tells me.

Even though the actors have many a corset mishap story (“toilet breaks were a joint effort”), the costumes were integral for them getting into their characters’ mindset. “Getting into the frame of mind they’d need to achieve half the things they achieved in those weighty clothes, it just makes them 10 times better than any other male criminal,” says Doherty.

And it was the weight and restrictions of the corsets that helped to form Mary’s powerful, badass walk. It’s the way she holds herself physically with a straight posture and a slight swagger to her footsteps. “It honestly came out of nowhere; I was just trying to walk! But when I realised that other people were noticing it, I decided to lean into it,” adds Doherty.

If Mary had the walk then Alice had the terrifying stare. “Because I’m usually so smiley, I wanted to try to differentiate Alice from myself, and the stare was me getting into her cutthroat and steely mindset,” explains Shaw. “It was actually scary,” adds Doherty.

Mary’s determination, Eliza’s loyalty and Alice’s confidence form a larger complex group of women – a sisterhood of sorts – that all have their own complicated, often detrimental, relationships with each other. And it’s those intricate power dynamics that really flesh out the characters and help move the story along.

“You’ve got to fall in love with each other, and we genuinely did as a larger show collective but also as the Elephants. It’s the easiest thing to play that you hate someone when you love them and have investment in each other as people. You can’t get those nuances unless you have that sense of security, safety and love. We had it in abundance, and it was beautiful,” says Doherty. It’s clear that the Elephants care for each other off screen, and that’s further cemented when Walters signs off the chat with a “Love you girls!”

A Thousand Blows launches on Disney+ on 21 February

Images: Disney+