Peaky Blinders has quietly become one of the biggest cult-hit shows in the crime-drama genre over the last decade. Even though it first premiered in 2013 and ran for five seasons, the BBC series got a whole new level of exposure when it hit Netflix in the 2020s. That led to a sixth and final season, and now a film that acts as an epilogue/sequel to the main series, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (watch the trailer).
ComicBook got to interview the cast of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, including series star Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) and Tim Roth (The Incredible Hulk), who is joining the Peaky Blinders universe with this film.
During the interview, there was a looming question we had to ask Cillian Murphy: Why return for more Peaky Blinders when the series finale seemed to deliver a definitive ending to Tommy Shelby’s story?
Well, as Murphy explains it, the ending of the Peaky Blinders TV series wasn’t as “definitive” as most people assume: “I liked the ambiguity of Season 6, the ending of 6, but I’ve always said that, you know, if there was more story to tell, I would be there,” Murphy said. “And, you know, we were going to make Series 7 and then the pandemic came along.”
As Murphy describes, Peaky Blinders’ creators had more story in mind, including a different ending, but never got the opportunity to realize it. The show ran at a consistent one or two-year gap between seasons until Season 5 aired in 2019. After that, there was a three-year gap until Season 6 premiered in 2022, followed by the Hollywood strikes in 2023. Most of the cast of Peaky Blinders moved on to greater opportunities – including Cillian Murphy becoming an Oscar-winner for his role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023). Getting everyone from the original cast back was impossible; however, telling a final feature-length story about how Tommy Shelby’s life dovetails with the real history of 20th-century Europe, and the pivotal turns of WWII, was still very doable.
“The film was always an ambition of ours because I felt like the TV show has always been cinematic, I think, in the way we told the story,” Murphy said. “And, so I think the goal, the real main goal, was to deliver on the series and for the film to justify its existence, and for the film to be primarily a gift to the fans for their investment in the 36 hours of television.”
The Immortal Man is being touted as a final gift to longtime fans of Peaky Blinders; however, a closer look at the cast and story premise (Tommy Shelby returning home to Birmingham during WWII and getting back to his criminal ways) leaves clear room for a a character like Barry Keoghan’s (Saltburn) Duke Shelby to become the face of the next generation of Peaky Blinders. We’ll see when the film premieres on Netflix on March 20th.
