Whatever happened to Tommy Shelby? You’re about to find out.
In a new trailer for Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, we pick up with Academy Award–winner Cillian Murphy as gangster king Tommy Shelby, years following the final season of Peaky Blinders. And that time has not been kind. “Once, I nearly got fuckin’ everything,” he intones. “But nearly doesn’t count.”
“When we meet him, he’s as broken as he has been,” Murphy (Oppenheimer, The Wind that Shakes the Barley) tells Netflix. “He’s just medicating and living in this purgatory that he’s created for himself in this big old house. He’s in this liminal space, not really living, he’s not really dead. He’s ignoring the world, he’s ignoring his family.”
What family is left, at least. “You live in a house haunted by ghosts,” a mysterious new character, played by Rebecca Ferguson (Dune, A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE), tells him in the trailer. “You abandoned your kingdom. And you abandoned your son.”
That son is Duke Shelby, played in The Immortal Man by Academy Award–nominee Barry Keoghan. Introduced in Season 6 of Peaky Blinders, Duke is Tommy’s illegitimate child, the heir to his gangster throne. Seven years on, he’s running the Peaky Blinders “like it’s 1919 all over again,” as Ada Shelby (Sophie Rundle) tells Tommy.
“The world don’t give a fuck about me,” Duke says in the trailer. “And I don’t give a fuck about the world.” The young Shelby is in the perfect position to be taken advantage of by a new ally even more unsavory than the typical Peaky Blinders contemporaries.
Enter British Fascist sympathizer Beckett (Academy Award nominee Tim Roth of Reservoir Dogs, The Hateful Eight fame). “Fascism comes at you in many disguises, as we know,” Roth tells Netflix. “He’s very reasonable. Which I thought would make him a more terrifying prospect, when I brought out the other guy.”
Tommy Shelby, of course, has no love for fascists; he spent the later seasons of Peaky Blinders working to take down the British Union of Fascists from the inside. But faced with the growing flames of another world war, this veteran of the Great War has retreated within himself. Perhaps only the prospect of a disillusioned Shelby heir taking the side of the Nazis can draw Tommy out of his self-imposed exile.
“I’ve heard you decided this wasn’t your war,” Hayden Stagg (Adolescence’s Primetime Emmy winner Stephen Graham) tells him.
“It is now,” Tommy responds.
The trailer, set to the original song “Puppet” by Grian Chatten, Antony Genn, and Martin Slattery, gives us a small taste of Tommy’s return as he strides into the Garrison Pub and demands the respect he’s always been owed. Of course, it’s been a while; does the name Tommy Shelby still carry the same weight on the streets of Birmingham?
Find out now by streaming Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man on Netflix now. And why not watch (or rewatch) the original series too?
