I'm a Liverpool barman but I get mobbed by Peaky Blinders fans who think I'm Tom Hardy
A Liverpool barman says he's regularly mobbed by Peaky Blinders fans who mistake him for one of the show’s main characters.
Aron Walker is a huge fan of the BBC drama and started donning a flat cap, long coat and full beard to look like his favourite character, Alfie Solomons.
The 37-year-old didn't initially see the resemblance between himself and Tom Hardy’s character but says strangers came up to him in the street mistaking him for the star.
He says he and his friends - who also dress up as characters from the show - even infiltrated the Peaky Blinders set in Manchester, in June 2022, after security guards mistook them as cast members.
"It was very surreal, and we went down for a photoshoot round the area where they were filming. As we were walking up and the securities looked at us and waved us straight in and we had the free run of the set,” Aron said. “We were there for an hour and a half, and we looked on social media and people were saying the peaky blinders of us on Twitter, and we went viral.”
Aron's friend, Scott Blowers, 50, is also often mistaken for Tommy Shelby - played by Cillian Murphy - and his other friend, Steve Pritchard, 42, is the spitting image of Arthur Shelby, played by Paul Anderson.
As well as working behind the bar, Aron has now turned being a doppelgänger into a career with he and his friends earning up to £600 per night for meet and greet events.
The Liverpool-born barman said: "What we’ve done is finding the best of the best of people that look like characters from the show. You also have got to make sure they are right person for the job.
“The job we do, and we never take it too seriously, it's all about having fun as well. It’s important to get things exactly right. The better the costume, the better it’s going to look and when we are entertaining the crowd which is brilliant."