It's got Peaky Blinders swagger, says House of Guinness writer

One of the imagined figures in the Netflix drama is Sean Rafferty, the brewery's foreman, played by Happy Valley star James Norton, whose fate becomes entangled with the dynasty's power struggles.

Norton says his character is an "amalgamation of lots of different people" who existed at the time, adding that he found researching into the history of Guinness "remarkable and fascinating".

The 40-year-old explains that as soon as he read the script he was ready to sign up to the show.

"I read the first four scripts all at once and it was a no-brainer," he says. "Almost every scene starts with Rafferty's silhouette in a window in a cloud of smoke and I thought 'sign me up, that's really cool'."

Most of the actors in the series were Irish, something Norton says added a level of pressure when it came to perfecting the accent and admits he was "so scared on the first day".

"You work really hard at the beginning and once you crack the first big dialogue scene and have spoken the first lines there's no going back," he explains.

The first scene Norton filmed was one where he punches three disloyal workers at the Guinness factory. He says he used the line 'I see your three names written in black ash up there' to get back into the accent for subsequent scenes.

Starring alongside Norton is Irish actress Danielle Galligan who plays Lady Olivia, an aristocrat who marries into the Guinness family. After the British monarch, she was the richest woman in Britain and Ireland at the time.

The actress says she loved researching her character and understanding what she was really like.

"She's such a firecracker in the series and then I actually found out she was also a very solitary and silent woman who painted lots of watercolours," Galligan explains.

"She was a woman who had everything and yet was still looking for something. Learning about her gave me a sense of her lack of fulfilment and added another layer to her."

Galligan says it was very special to tell an Irish story and "to do it on a global scale is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience".

Joining Galligan is Niamh McCormack, whose character is part of the rebellious Fenian Brotherhood, and Jack Gleeson, who is best known for playing Joffrey Baratheon in Game of Thrones.

McCormack and Gleeson say they are proud to be part of a series that puts Ireland on the map, but admit that with pride comes pressure over how it will be received by audiences at home.

"It's always a factor but I tried not to think about it too much," Gleeson says. "You want things to be represented well but also hopefully people know not to take it too seriously as a historical document."

Knight was less worried about what audiences would think, admitting: "I should care but I don't - if you worry what people are going to think you can't really do anything as you'd be trying to please too many different people."

House of Guinness has already been compared to the likes of Succession, The Crown and Peaky Blinders but Knight is indifferent about how people compare it.

"People say every project is a cross between stuff and I don't take that too seriously, I'm confident that this is its own thing," he says.