Inside ‘Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man’ – Steven Knight on Tommy Shelby’s Fate, the Movie’s Big Death and the Cillian Murphy–Barry Keoghan Showdown
‘Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man’ Movie Ending Explained: Steven Knight on That Big Death, the Cillian Murphy–Barry Keoghan Duel and the Future of the Shelby Dynasty
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man finally brings Tommy Shelby back in a bloody, operatic feature film that kills off a major character, stages a ferocious showdown between Cillian Murphy and Barry Keoghan, and quietly reloads the gun for a new Netflix spinoff about the Shelby dynasty. In a new conversation with Variety, creator Steven Knight breaks down why the movie had to end this way, how he approached that controversial death, and what audiences can expect from the next generation of Peaky Blinders.
From BBC Gangland Saga to Netflix Event Movie: Where ‘The Immortal Man’ Fits
After six seasons charting Tommy Shelby’s rise from shell‑shocked World War I veteran to king of Birmingham’s underworld, Peaky Blinders ended in 2022 on a note of wary rebirth: Tommy rode off into the mist, apparently freed from his death sentence and the fascists closing in on him. The movie picks up from that mythology—less a direct continuation of season 6 than a fever‑dream coda that clarifies what “immortality” really means in the Peaky universe.
Knight has long said the story was conceived as “a family saga between two wars.” With The Immortal Man, he pushes just over the edge of that original frame while paying off long‑gestating themes: the cost of ambition, the trauma of war, and the way legends outlive the men who create them.
“Tommy was never going to get away clean. The question was what kind of death a man like that deserves,” Knight tells Variety. “The film is about the difference between a man dying and a myth refusing to die.”
The Movie’s Big Death, Explained: Why That Character Had to Go
Spoiler warning: this section discusses the major character death in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. Knight doesn’t treat the movie as a nostalgia tour. Within its first hour, a key Shelby figure is violently removed from the board, jolting the story out of “reunion special” mode and into tragedy.
In the Variety interview, Knight frames the death less as a twist than as a structural necessity: the Shelbys have always defined themselves by who they’ve lost—Grace, John, Polly. The new film extends that pattern into the next generation, forcing Tommy to confront the fact that violence no longer only circles him; it radiates outward to people who didn’t choose his life.
“You can’t tell a story about consequence and then shield the people Tommy loves,” Knight says. “The death had to hurt the audience, otherwise it’s just another body on the pile.”
Structurally, the death crystallizes three things:
- It turns the final act into a revenge tragedy, pushing Tommy toward the showdown with Barry Keoghan’s antagonist.
- It creates moral separation between older and younger Shelbys, laying emotional groundwork for the spinoff.
- It answers the lingering question from the series: can Tommy ever truly leave the life he built? The film’s answer is a resigned “no”—at least not without blood.
Cillian Murphy vs. Barry Keoghan: Inside the Movie’s Hyped Showdown
If the series finale promised Tommy’s rebirth, the movie delivers his reckoning—and Barry Keoghan is the perfect avatar for that energy. Fresh off prestige work like The Banshees of Inisherin and Saltburn, Keoghan slides into the Peaky Blinders world like he’s always lived there, weaponizing that wiry unpredictability against Murphy’s carved‑from‑granite stillness.
Knight tells Variety he wrote the character with Keoghan specifically in mind, leaning into a different kind of threat than the show’s previous villains. Where Tom Hardy’s Alfie was chaos and Adrien Brody’s Luca Changretta was operatic vengeance, Keoghan’s figure is something colder: a post‑war opportunist who understands how to turn Tommy’s legend against him.
“Barry brings this sense that the room isn’t safe even when he’s smiling,” Knight explains. “The film needed someone who could look Tommy Shelby in the eye and not blink.”
The eventual confrontation between Murphy and Keoghan is staged almost like a Western duel—two men circling the ruins of an empire built on lies, with the Shelbys’ latest loss hanging in the air. It’s less about who draws first and more about which man can live with what he’s done.
Is Tommy Shelby Really “Immortal”? Parsing the Ending and Its Ambiguities
The title The Immortal Man invites the most basic fan question: does Tommy Shelby die? Knight plays a familiar game—offering viewers an emotionally definitive ending while leaving just enough ambiguity for the character to haunt whatever comes next.
Without recapping every beat of the finale, the film ultimately presents two layers of “immortality”:
- Biographical: Tommy faces a situation where death seems not only likely but almost cosmically appropriate, echoing the fake‑out from season 6. The film toys with point‑of‑view and editing in a way that makes it deliberately hard to say, with forensic certainty, whether we’re watching his final moments or his legend taking on a life of its own.
- Mythic: Regardless of the literal outcome, the Shelbys and the world around them have already baked Tommy into their stories. As Knight tells Variety, “The Immortal Man isn’t a promise that he never dies; it’s a statement that men like him never really leave.”
“I’ve always been more interested in what people choose to believe about Tommy than in the paperwork of how he dies,” Knight says. “The ending is there if you want to see it, but so is the myth.”
The Next Chapter: What Steven Knight Reveals About the Shelby Spinoff
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man isn’t just a curtain call; it’s also a hand‑off. Knight confirms to Variety that an upcoming spinoff is in active development at Netflix, leaning into the idea of a “Shelby dynasty” rather than a simple retread of the original show.
Details are still under wraps, but the movie quietly sketches the map:
- Younger family members step into more prominent positions, reacting to the big death in ways that reveal clear philosophical fault lines inside the clan.
- The economic landscape is shifting; wartime profiteering is giving way to a new era of global capital, and the Shelbys have to evolve from gangsters into something more insidious—or be left behind.
- The film introduces side characters whose loyalties are murky, a classic Knight setup for serialized drama.
“The spinoff is about what happens when the legend becomes an inheritance,” Knight teases. “You’ve got children and grandchildren who grew up in the shadow of the razor blades. What do they do with that?”
Style, Soundtrack and Spectacle: Does the Movie Feel Like ‘Peak’ Peaky Blinders?
Visually and sonically, The Immortal Man doubles down on what turned Peaky Blinders into a global cult object: slow‑motion swagger, anachronistic rock needle‑drops, and near‑mythic tableaux of men in long coats walking into danger like it’s a board meeting.
- Cinematography: The movie embraces a wider canvas—battlefields, stately homes, shadowed back‑rooms—without losing the grime of Small Heath. The contrast between old factories and new money is sharper than ever.
- Music: The soundtrack continues the show’s punk‑rock approach to period drama, splicing modern tracks over vintage settings. It’s a choice that still won’t work for purists, but has become part of the franchise’s DNA.
- Costume & production design: The iconic razor‑cap aesthetic remains, but there’s more emphasis on the transitional fashion of the era, hinting that the Shelbys’ world is aging out of itself.
Strengths and Weaknesses: Does the Film Earn Its Place in the Peaky Canon?
Knight’s comments to Variety help clarify what The Immortal Man is trying to be: not a greatest‑hits compilation, but a final movement in a long, strange symphony. On those terms, it mostly works— but not without caveats.
Where the Movie Lands Strong
- Murphy’s performance: Older, more haunted, and less invincible, his Tommy is riveting even when he’s barely speaking.
- The big death’s emotional weight: Knight’s insistence that the death “had to hurt” pays off; it reshapes how you read earlier seasons.
- Themes of legacy and myth: The film has a clear point of view on what it means to build a reputation on violence and then try to retire from it.
Where It Stumbles
- Compressed storytelling: Decades of character work are funneled into just over two hours, and some side players—even familiar Shelbys—feel shortchanged.
- Spinoff setup: A few late‑game beats play less like organic drama and more like backdoor‑pilot business.
- Stylization fatigue: For viewers who’d grown weary of the show’s slow‑mo swagger, the film doesn’t course‑correct; it doubles down.
Still, in the crowded field of TV‑to‑film continuations, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man feels more purposeful than most. It closes a chapter, interrogates its own mythology, and—thanks to that devastating death—refuses the easy comfort of happily‑ever‑after.
Rating: 4 out of 5 – a bruising, uneven but genuinely felt farewell to one of TV’s most charismatic anti‑heroes.
Why ‘Peaky Blinders’ Still Matters in 2026
Culturally, Peaky Blinders has long been bigger than its ratings: it reshaped menswear (flat caps and three‑piece suits), spawned themed bars from Birmingham to Brooklyn, and helped cement Cillian Murphy as a marquee name long before Oppenheimer made him an Oscar winner.
The timing of The Immortal Man is shrewd. In a streaming landscape obsessed with IP, Knight is offering something slightly rarer: a crime saga willing to age with its characters. As the spinoff looms, the movie serves as both elegy and relay baton—proof that the Peaky Blinders universe can survive without simply repeating itself.
For viewers coming in cold, the film might feel like a richly textured but emotionally overstuffed gangster epic. For long‑time fans, especially those who’ve argued over Tommy’s fate for years, it’s a final, knotty conversation with a character who was never meant to be simple.
Final Thoughts: An Ending That Refuses to Stay Dead
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man was never going to please everyone. Some fans wanted clean closure, others wanted Tommy on a horse forever, riding into increasingly stylized sunsets. What Knight delivers, as he explains in his Variety interview, is something messier: a story about a man who can’t outrun what he built, and a family that has to figure out who they are when the myth either dies—or refuses to.
As the Shelby dynasty spinoff moves forward, the film’s biggest legacy may be the standard it sets. If Peaky Blinders is going to live on, it can’t just trade on razor caps and Nick Cave drops. It has to keep asking the hard questions that made Tommy Shelby more than just a poster on the wall. On that front, The Immortal Man is a fitting, if fractured, farewell.
