If there’s one thing that could drag gangster king Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) out of self-imposed retirement, it’s a world war against a fascist regime.
But at the start of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, the former kingpin of Birmingham’s titular gang is in exile. For a World War I veteran like Tommy, the call to combat has little appeal. “I’ve got a war of me own,” he tells his sister, Ada (Sophie Rundle), “inside of me head.” Ada, Johnny Dogs (Packy Lee), and the mysterious Kaulo (Rebecca Ferguson) all try to pull Tommy out of his funk, but he remains resolutely impartial. Even his outfits feel out of character.
Across six seasons of the hit series Peaky Blinders, Tommy survived one battle after another, often against fascists like Oswald Mosley (Sam Claflin). But nothing has been harder than this battle against himself. “He’s a bit lost,” Murphy said on an episode of the new Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man podcast. “It’s almost like he’s in a purgatory. He’s self-medicating, writing down all these thoughts, but he has no purpose in life, and he’s not engaging in the war, which is bizarre.”
The onetime rom baro (king of the Romani) is adrift after the deaths of so many loved ones — he’s flattened by family, his greatest strength turned into a weakness. But family is also what will drag him back to Birmingham. When Tommy’s son Duke (Barry Keoghan) is drawn into a scheme by the British Union of Fascists to win the war for Germany, tragedy strikes, and the last Shelby standing puts on his suit and mounts up. “It’s that classic story,” Murphy said. “One final job, you know?”
It won’t be easy. Duke is leading a new generation of Peaky Blinders, and Tommy is short on allies. Up against the forces of Nazi agent Beckett (Tim Roth), the stakes of this fight are higher than ever. This is no barroom brawl or street fight: The fate of the free world hangs in the balance. And Tommy Shelby may be the Immortal Man, but he’s not invincible.
Read on to find out what becomes of Tommy, Duke, and the entire cast of characters in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, now streaming on Netflix.
What is Beckett’s plan for Great Britain?
The Immortal Man kicks off with a pair of sequences that immediately ground the film in a new era. First, we see a line of captives working on counterfeit money in Frankfurt’s Sachsenhausen concentration camp — part of the real-life Operation Bernhard, an effort by the Nazis to crash the British economy with an influx of counterfeit banknotes.
In reality, the counterfeit notes were detected, and the Bank of England responded by withdrawing from circulation all notes worth more than 5 pounds. In The Immortal Man, the scheme falls at the feet of the Peaky Blinders.
“I knew about Operation Bernhard beforehand, and I always thought that was an amazing potential drama, this attempt to destroy the British economy with fake banknotes,” Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight says. “It’s such a great concept. Imagine being offered a load of fake banknotes and having to choose between loyalty to your country and being a billionaire.”
Ending the story of the original Peaky Blinders series with World War II was always Knight’s intention. “I always thought … that I wanted it to be the story of a family between two wars, and we take it to the Second World War,” Knight says. “I wanted Tommy Shelby to come back in 1919, damaged as a veteran of World War I, and [then] his kids are involved in World War II. … Here’s this generation recovering from World War I, only to pass that terrible legacy on to the next generation.”
The second frontal assault on Great Britain comes from the sky, with Nazi bombs falling on the factories of Birmingham. The film is dedicated to the 53 munitions workers who died in the Birmingham Blitz. “Birmingham then was the front line, as was London and Liverpool and Manchester,” he continues. “These cities would be randomly carpet bombed every night.”
Into Birmingham’s war-torn wasteland strides Duke Shelby and his new generation of Peaky Blinders, stealing munitions from the bombed-out factories and beating anyone who looks askance at them. “The new Peakys have a different moral code [than] Tommy and the original Peakys had,” director Tom Harper tells Netflix. “They’re a bit more anarchic, and they don’t behave in a way that Tommy would want them to. For Duke, that’s because he’s trying to live up to his father’s reputation.”
“I look at it like a pack of hyenas,” Keoghan tells Netflix. “They’re all giddy. Everything is second nature to them: how they pass the crowbars, how they don’t even look at one another.”
Duke may come across as a ruthless leader, but deep down he’s also a lost boy in search of a guiding light. Introduced in Season 6 of Peaky Blinders (in which he was played by Conrad Khan), Duke is the product of Tommy’s pre–Great War fling with a Romani woman named Zelda. His mother is dead now, and his father wants nothing to do with him.
“The world don’t give a fuck about me,” Duke tells Beckett, “and I don’t give a fuck about the world.” That edge makes him an irresistible target for Beckett, the fascist in charge of the counterfeit money operation. “It’s just a broken kid who would love nothing more than his dad to be around,” Keoghan said on the Immortal Man podcast. “There’s a weird underlying father thing going on there.”
Duke’s theft of munitions meant for the front lines echoes the first episode of Peaky Blinders, in which Tommy and his gang pulled off a similar heist. It also draws the attention of Duke’s aunt Ada, who threatens to go to the police. Now a member of parliament (a suggestion made by Tommy himself in the Season 6 finale), Ada has little patience for this reincarnation of her brother’s youthful angst. “Her morality is so intrinsic to her,” Rundle said on the Immortal Man podcast. “And he doesn’t play by the rules. She can’t be bought in any way, even by this idea of family.”
Duke’s nihilism is in sharp contrast to Ada’s principles. He agrees to serve as Beckett’s distribution partner for the counterfeit money and even kills the unreliable Virgil (Thomas Arnold) on his orders. With things coming to a head in Birmingham, Tommy Shelby is missed more than ever, but he’s still lost in his own world.
Who is Kaulo?
The mysterious Romani fortune teller Kaulo (Rebecca Ferguson) has a peculiar connection to Tommy: She’s the identical twin of his old paramour Zelda, Duke’s mother, long since dead. Kaulo claims that she can channel Zelda’s consciousness — and seems to prove it by describing things only Zelda could have seen.
Kaulo is Knight’s attempt to fill the void left by a beloved Peaky cast member: Helen McCrory, who made Polly Gray a foundation of the original series before the actress’s untimely death in 2021. “Tommy says … , ‘I never thought I’d meet another woman like Polly Gray,’ ” Knight says. “That’s sort of what I wanted … to have that Polly Gray figure: [Someone] who could laugh but then … suddenly they’re a witch, suddenly they’re mystic, they’ve got power.”
Ferguson took the comparison to heart. “I’ve studied a lot of Helen’s wonderful work and what she believed in and how she believed in it,” she tells Netflix. “Tommy has enormous belief, and with belief comes power. That’s something that my character also knows: that she can manipulate other people.” Claiming her sister is “borrowing” her body, Kaulo tempts Tommy with words from his dead daughter. She soon seduces Tommy and gets deeper under his skin than anyone has in years.
What happened to Arthur?
Tommy has been telling everyone who asks that he’s on his own by choice — his solitude is the natural conclusion of his shrinking family. Arthur (Paul Anderson) is dead, apparently by his own hand. Tommy’s second wife, Lizzie (Natasha O’Keeffe), left him after the death of their daughter, Ruby. His brother Finn (Harry Kirton) has been cut out of the family in disgrace. And Tommy’s son Charles is fighting on the front lines. “He’s alone and grieving and regretful, and trying to write his way out of it,” Knight said on the Immortal Man podcast.
But there’s more to the story than Tommy lets on. During one of the séances in which Kaulo claims to be possessed by her sister’s spirit, “Zelda” begs Tommy to help their son, offering to trade information from the other side — a message from Arthur. “Everyone believes Arthur Shelby took his own life on the bridge,” Kaulo says. “He wasn’t by himself, was he? You were there with him.”
This is a secret Knight has been keeping for years: Tommy killed Arthur in a drunken grapple after his brother stole his car. “I’ve been avoiding saying that for so long,” Knight said on the Immortal Man podcast. But it wasn’t always the plan. “Sometimes something occurs to you that explains what you’ve been writing,” Knight added. “I was writing this intense guilt. And then you think, ‘Well, that’s why he’s so guilty. Because it was him.’ ”
“That’s where the door in me head blew open,” Tommy tells Kaulo, insisting that the tragedy was an accident. It’s eating away at him all the same. “He will never, ever be at peace until he’s no longer on this world because of that,” Murphy said on the Immortal Man podcast.
Kaulo offers him a way out. “You can’t save Arthur,” she says. “You can’t save Ruby. But you can save your son.”
What happens to Ada?
And Duke needs saving. His next assignment from Beckett is simple — and deadly. Ada Shelby is causing trouble, and Beckett wants her dead. Meeting Duke in the same pigpen “office” where Ada begged him to stop terrorizing Birmingham, Beckett appeals to Duke’s inner child. “If you were my son, I would cherish you,” he says. Duke sets off to accomplish his mission — even as a newly suited Tommy approaches Birmingham with Johnny Dogs.
But, to his surprise, Duke is incapable of following through. “I wanted Duke to believe that he is someone who has no lines that he will not cross,” Knight says. “He thinks of himself as someone who will do anything. But I wanted to take him on a journey where he actually comes to a line which he cannot cross, and it’s to do with family. It’s as if that’s what he’s inherited, this loyalty to the family.”
Pointing his gun at Ada from a phone booth, Duke breaks down and chases after her, desperate to warn his aunt that Beckett is out to get her. “It’s the battle between the angel on one shoulder and the demon on the other,” Harper says. “They collide, and you see that unfold in the telephone box. I think that he does that so, so beautifully, and ultimately he decides who he is.”
But Duke’s change of heart comes too late, and the young Blinder watches from a pile of blitzed rubble as Beckett shoots Ada in the head and scorns Duke. “You did not make me proud,” he says as he stalks away in the rain. On his way into the city, Tommy sees a vision of Ada on the road, now just another ghost.
“It’s the final straw for Tommy and his grief,” Murphy says. “That moment where he sees her on the side of the mountain is one of my favorite scenes in the film, because it’s nonverbal — all of that love that he can’t express because he’s incapable of it.”
He’s plenty capable of expressing fury. Upon arriving back in Birmingham and receiving confirmation of his sister’s death, Tommy heads off on a rampage. He storms into the Garrison, straps a grenade to a soldier who doesn’t recognize him, and tosses Duke to the floor of the pigpen, demanding to know what part he played in Ada’s death.
This filthy sequence was the first one Murphy and Keoghan filmed together, and it made quite an impression. “I remember going to the [assistant directors] after and going, ‘Am I gonna go blind?’ ” Keoghan recalls, “ ‘because I think I swallowed so much mud.’ But look, I can still hear and see, so. But I’m glad we started there, because everything else has just been a bonus.”
Duke pushes back. “Yeah, I’ve sinned,” he tells Tommy. “Because sin is all I fuckin’ know. Because sin is all you fuckin’ left me.” But he also insists he had nothing to do with Ada’s death and points Tommy to Beckett and his plan.
As he waits for Beckett at the morgue, Tommy says goodbye to Ada and buries his last ghost. “All of us dead, except for the one who wants to be dead,” he tells her body. “I confess to you, sister: I killed our brother Arthur. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t an act of mercy. I killed him because I was full of booze and rage.”
This, in truth, is what Tommy has been unable to escape from: the knowledge of just how far he has fallen. “Everything that Tommy has ever stood for is family,” Knight said on the Immortal Man podcast. “And here he is, he shot his own brother. Everything falls apart after that. There is nothing left because everything you’ve ever stood for, everything you’ve represented, has gone. Tommy Shelby killed his everything all at once.”
Here, beside the corpse of his beloved sister, Tommy accepts his fate. “From this bad will come some good,” he promises. Beckett is waiting outside, and a furious gunfight ensues. Tommy makes it through, as always. But his next steps are less certain.
How do Tommy and Duke defeat Beckett?
With Beckett and his Nazi minions plotting to receive a massive shipment of counterfeit money in Liverpool, the Blinders will need all the help they can get to save the war effort. Tommy calls in Johnny Dogs, Curly (Ian Peck), Charlie Strong (Ned Dennehy), and even Hayden Stagg (Stephen Graham), the union convener spared by Arthur in Season 6. Their plan is to wipe out Beckett’s shipment with canalboats full of explosives while Tommy enters his warehouse via an abandoned tunnel.
“We’ll win no medals, and no one will know what we’ve done,” Tommy tells Stagg. “But we’ll have done a good thing for a good cause.” Before he enters the tunnel, Tommy has Kaulo read his palm. She gives him a shocking forecast that he takes in typical Tommy stride: Before the night is over, Tommy will kill Duke, or Duke will kill Tommy. Kaulo has already provided her nephew with a bullet inscribed with Tommy’s name, a Peaky Blinders tradition that dates back to the beginning of the series.
As Tommy crawls through war flashbacks in the tunnel, Duke sets a trap for Beckett by inaccurately describing his father’s plan. By the time the canalboats arrive, Beckett and his crew are expecting men with guns; they’re unprepared for a massive explosion. As the dust settles, Beckett points a gun at the treacherous Duke. In the nick of time, Tommy sets off a land mine and all hell breaks loose: The Blinders charge the warehouse, guns blazing.
Another land mine destroys the store of money, putting an end to Beckett’s plot. He makes a run for it in his car, but the king of the Peaky Blinders stands in his way. Tommy takes two bullets to the gut and returns fire, killing Beckett with a shot to the head. He stands with arms outstretched as the careening car heads for him — but Duke knocks him out of the way.
Does Tommy Shelby die?
What happens next is the moment all of Peaky Blinders has been building to. Tommy Shelby has survived Russian gangsters, English fascists, Italian mobsters, and even a phony cancer diagnosis. At the end of the line, the only thing that can kill Tommy Shelby is his own iron will.
“He welcomes it,” Knight says. “And the point is that for a long time, probably since he got back from the trenches, death has always been an option for him. That’s what’s made him so strong and powerful. … If you’ve got someone who is prepared to die, they’re almost unstoppable.”
Cradled in his son’s arms, Tommy implores him to put him down like an animal, a callback to one of Murphy’s favorite Peaky Blinders motifs. “One of my favorite lines in the TV show was always that line, ‘I am a horse,’ ” Murphy says, referring to Season 2, Episode 2. “When he collapses in Duke’s arms, he says, ‘You’d do it for a horse.’ The cold kind of brutality with which he can take a horse out of its misery, he’s asking Duke to treat him like that.”
Knight never considered another possible ending for Tommy. “I had the ending in mind when I started the film,” he says. “I wanted the son to kill the father.” And kill him he does, in a moment that’s both brutal and tender.
For Murphy, it capped a decade-plus of playing the same character. But he’s fittingly unsentimental, just as Tommy would be. “We shot that in the first week of production,” Murphy says. “I suppose the conventional way to do it would have been Tommy gets shot and Duke is cradling him in his arms, but it didn’t work out like that. They ended up holding each other and supporting each other and then created this beautiful shape inside the warehouse. That was unexpected.”
Keoghan, too, found shooting the scene more intense than expected. “I think it’s beautiful,” he says. “Me and Cillian found really something animalistic in it, rubbing our heads together and him leaning on me.”
Tommy’s death is a passing of the torch and a passing of the Shelby curse. “He whispers in his ear, ‘Heavy lies the crown,’ ” Murphy said on the Immortal Man podcast. “He’s saying, ‘Do it with the bullet, I know the bullet exists.’ It’s purely physical. I just want to leave this realm.”
What are Tommy’s last words?
As Tommy lies dying, he mouths his final words: “In the bleak midwinter.” It’s a phrase that echoes the first episode of Peaky Blinders, a mantra that reminds the men who fought in World War I of just how far they’ve come. “They all came up out of the ground and were in a place in no man’s land where they had no chance,” Knight said on the Immortal Man podcast. “So they sang ‘In the Bleak Midwinter,’ and then they get miraculously rescued. As they are rescued, they say to each other, ‘From now on, everything is a bonus. We died then. Now we do what we want.’ ”
And so Tommy did. As his body burns in a Romani funeral, Murphy narrates his last will and testament. “Throughout it all, I had my family,” he says. “We are reunited now, in whichever place will have us.” Around Tommy’s body lie photos of that family: his sister, Ada; his brothers Arthur and John (Joe Cole); his first wife, Grace (Annabelle Wallis), and their children; and Aunt Polly. “Burn my body,” Tommy tells Duke in writing. “Let the ash blow. I am free.” Long live the king.
What’s next for Peaky Blinders?
While Tommy’s story may be over, Peaky Blinders will return for a sequel series set in the 1950s. There’s no word yet on which characters will appear, but it will be written by Knight. Murphy will remain involved as an executive producer.
“Once again, it will be rooted in Birmingham and will tell the story of a city rising from the ashes of the Birmingham Blitz,” Knight told Netflix when the series was announced. “The new generation of Shelbys have taken the wheel, and it will be a hell of a ride.”
That’s a promise in keeping with The Immortal Man. Murphy recalls the moment when Tommy’s death scene was captured during the first week of production.
“All the Peakys were around watching it, and none of us really said anything,” he says. “It was bizarre, because we did the death scene and then we had to go and shoot the rest of the movie.” The work of the Peaky Blinders continues.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man and all six seasons of the Peaky Blinders series are now streaming on Netflix.
