During one of his boxing matches in season 2 of the show, Arthur beats a young man to death and burns down a pub after being seized by uncontrollable anger. Later on, there is a moment of remorse, but it is extremely fleeting, as he inevitably finds himself lured back into a life of indiscriminate crimes. While none of the Shelbys are saints, Arthur’s inability to reckon with the destruction he causes proved to be a liability time and again, and it wouldn’t have been too shocking if he was killed off due to this volatile aspect of his personality.
Speaking to Interview Magazine, Anderson talked about the anxiety of expected comeuppance that he thought his character would have gotten in season 2, and how it was subverted by Knight when John Shelby (Joe Cole) got killed off instead to introduce a legitimate dramatic climax in the show:
“On our journeys to Liverpool, Birmingham, or Manchester where we shoot, Joe Cole and I have this conversation about who’s going to die. We’re convinced that it’s either me or him. We go through the cast and it always comes back to that it’s probably going to be me, and he goes, ‘No, no. It will be John.’ It’s quite nice actually because we have no idea what Steven’s going to do… I was actually convinced that Arthur was going to get killed in Season Two because he’d left such a trail of destruction behind him.”
Although Arthur was briefly believed to be dead in season 4, this was a deliberate fake-out amidst his self-destructive tendencies and unhealthy coping mechanisms to keep his inner demons at bay. While Arthur makes it to the end, it might have come at a very dear cost.