It’s been over a dozen years since Peaky Blinders premiered and Cillian Murphy first donned a flat cap and long coat, gracing screens as the imposing, impenetrable, and inimitable Thomas Shelby. Over the course of its six-season run, as Peaky became a global phenomenon — accumulating millions of fans (from Snoop Dogg to Brad Pitt to the late David Bowie), inspiring countless trips to the barbershop with a request for the “Tommy Shelby haircut,” and motivating pilgrimages to the real Garrison Pub in Birmingham, England — the drama’s central character became so recognizable that even with that now-iconic cap pulled down low over his eyes and that penetrating stare momentarily masked, Tommy Shelby is always unmistakably himself. Just a glimpse of him can evoke the opening chords of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand.”

Which is why it’s all the more shocking to get about midway through Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, the new film written by Peaky creator Steven Knight and directed by Tom Harper that picks up with the Shelby family a few years after the series left off, and hear a man ask Tommy — and in the Garrison, no less — “Who the fuck is Tommy Shelby?”  

While the man who posed this question in the movie gets a very fitting reply that can’t really be replicated with mere words, it’s worth reflecting on this question a little bit more to see if there is a satisfactory answer to it. Because, despite all the time we’ve spent with Tommy Shelby, despite knowing about his affinity for horses, his deep loyalty to his family, his residual trauma from serving in World War I, and his ability to show compassion and cruelty in equal measures, there’s a way in which he can seem completely unknowable, possibly immortal, more myth than man. So perhaps it’s best to ask the man himself. 

Photo by Tom Craig

For Murphy, who has inhabited this character for about a quarter of his life, the answer to the question, “Who is Tommy Shelby?” is both clear and complicated. “He’s an incredibly complex, contradictory, frustrating, relentless character,” Murphy says, “and I think that people are very attracted to that.” 

The pull toward Tommy can be nothing short of magnetic. “Everything orbits around Tommy Shelby.  Everything orbits around Cillian,” Knight says. “And his performance is so strong and so real. I read a thing which you shouldn’t really be proud of, but there was a real mafia boss interviewed in jail in New York, and [he was asked], ‘Who is the most realistic [fictional gangster]?’  And he said, ‘Tommy Shelby.’ ”

And yet, at the onset of The Immortal Man, Tommy Shelby is at the center of nothing so much as his own suffering; he’s a prisoner of his mind, replaying a tragic past in which he’s lost his loves, his children, his family — everything. “What’s that saying? ‘The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master,’ ” says Murphy, “and when we meet [Tommy] at the beginning of the film, he’s a recluse, and he’s retreated to addiction and drugs — and then there’s his grief.”  

While Tommy might be resigned to his retreat from the world, the world has other plans. The film takes place in 1940, already deep in the darkness of World War II, and even though nowhere in England is unaffected by German bombers, the Shelby family’s home turf of Birmingham is hit particularly hard because of its abundance of munitions factories. The stakes are incredibly high for the country and for the Shelbys, and it’s this setting that made The Immortal Man seem so urgent to Murphy, who says about the film, “It needed to exist for a reason.” And there really isn’t a better one than the existential threat posed by World War II. “As a veteran of World War I and a decorated soldier, how would Tommy Shelby react in World War II, where it’s his people — Gypsy people — that are among the millions being targeted by the Nazis,” Murphy says. “How does he respond to it?”

At first, it’s unclear if Tommy can respond. He isn’t calling the shots in his family anymore; he has stepped back from that role, ceding it to his eldest son, Duke (Barry Keoghan). “When we meet [Tommy], he’s as broken as he has been,” Murphy says. “He’s just medicating and living in this purgatory that he’d created for himself in this big old house. He’s in this liminal space — he’s not really living, he’s not really dead. He’s ignoring the world; he’s ignoring his family.”  

He’s also contemplating his own mortality — and the legacy he’s leaving behind, based both on his past deeds and how he’s set up the next generation of Shelbys, specifically Duke. Keoghan is new to the Peaky universe, and actually found out he’d be playing Tommy’s son while texting with Murphy on Father’s Day. Murphy praises Keoghan in the role, saying that the actor has “this kind of magic onscreen … an intelligence and unpredictability that people are very attracted to; we wanted someone who could match Tommy in terms of charisma, and he has that.” 

Keoghan, in turn, has nothing but praise for his onscreen father. When asked what it is that Murphy brings to the role of Tommy Shelby, he says, “Everything you could ask for, if I’m being honest. Not a certain thing or two. He gives you so much, each take, each time. As an actor, as a person, he’s very supportive. He makes you raise your game entirely. And that’s the place I wanna be, where I have to keep raising the bar. But that’s Cillian, that’s not Tommy.”

Of course, while Cillian Murphy and Tommy Shelby are completely different (even if Murphy does say that “when you’ve played a character for that long, you do kind of swap atoms with them”), Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man marks a legacy-defining moment for both actor and character as they hang up their flat caps for the last time.

“It’s a long time to be playing a character,” says Murphy.  “And it’s a massive gift to be given a character who’s that rich and that complex, that challenging to play, and is so wildly different to me as a person and requires great lengths to travel to get to.”  

Murphy’s legacy feels secured as an actor who takes risks and challenges himself not only by embodying the singular Tommy Shelby, but also with roles in films both epic (like his Academy Award–winning performance in Oppenheimer) and intimate (like his acclaimed turns in the films Steve and Small Things Like These). But what about the legacy of Tommy Shelby?

Immortal Man director Tom Harper has some thoughts. “Tommy and Cillian are both reluctant kings,” Harper tells Netflix. “Clearly, Cillian loves acting and is brilliant at it, but there are some things that go along with it that he will demur from. And we love him for it. Same for Tommy. He’s the chosen one, and he knows he has a role to fulfill, and he doesn’t shy away from it, but at the same time, there’s something reluctant about it.”

As for Murphy, he doesn’t know if he can say for sure what Tommy’s legacy is — though he can share some thoughts about what it means to Tommy Shelby to be the “immortal man.” 

“He was always unafraid of death; he always wanted death as a release,” Murphy says. “Everyone else around him kept being lost to him, but he kept existing, yet didn’t want to. So maybe [thinking of himself as an immortal man] is a bittersweet play on his situation, his legacy. Or maybe it’s in the generational trauma that he’s handed down to people that still continues, because of all the terrible deeds. I wouldn’t want to be the son of Tommy Shelby. ”