Cillian Murphy is back, but he didn’t plan on it. Tommy Shelby was done, the show had ended on what Murphy considered a high, and he had spent the years since making very different films.
Murphy was working on the intimate Small Things Like These, a drama about an Irish father confronting the Catholic Church’s legacy, and Steve, a project he has described as deeply personal. He had an Oscar. He had privacy. He had a reason to say no.
Then Steven Knight called with a script, and Murphy said yes.
“It seems like Tommy Shelby wasn’t finished with me,” Murphy told Netflix when the film was announced.
In a new interview with CBS News conducted in his old North London neighborhood, Murphy reflected on what drew him back and what it means to keep returning to characters who live in the difficult, morally complicated space where, he says, the best art exists.
“I think that’s where good art exists, generally,” Murphy told CBS News correspondent Seth Doane.
“Certainly in the art that I enjoy, it’s never easy. It’s a little tricky. It’s not reductive, because human behavior is so weird. That’s the stuff that I like.”
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in theaters now. It arrives on Netflix on March 20.
What Is The Immortal Man About?
The film is set in Birmingham in 1940, six years after the events of the final season of the BBC series, and picks up with Tommy Shelby in a state of collapse.
He has retreated to a crumbling rural estate, far from Birmingham and far from the empire he spent six seasons building and destroying. He is grieving, the death of his young daughter Ruby from illness, the death of his brother Arthur, who died by suicide, and has handed control of the Peaky Blinders gang to his estranged Romani son Duke.
Duke is played by Barry Keoghan, who takes over the role from Conrad Khan, who portrayed the character as a teenager in Season 6.
The casting is immediately, obviously correct.
Duke is reckless, nihilistic, and running the gang into catastrophe, striking a deal with Beckett, played by Tim Roth, the Treasurer of the British Union of Fascists, to help move £350 million in Nazi counterfeit currency into Britain via canal boat from Liverpool.
The scheme, based loosely on the real Operation Bernhard, a wartime Nazi plan to destabilize the British economy through counterfeiting, would tank the pound and, by extension, the British war effort.
It would also mean the Romani-rooted Peaky Blinders profiting from a regime that persecutes their own people. “The world don’t give a fuck about me, and I don’t give a fuck about the world,” Duke says in the film.
Tommy is pulled back from exile by two forces. The first is his sister Ada, played by Sophie Rundle, now a Member of Parliament, who tells Tommy that Duke will either be “hung by the law or lynched by the people.”
The second is Kaulo, a Romani queen played by Rebecca Ferguson, the twin sister of Duke’s mother, who senses Tommy’s suffering and travels to his estate to confront him.
He cannot stay hidden. His son is going to get himself killed or start a war, and the only person who can stop it is the man who walked away.
The film was written by series creator Steven Knight and directed by Tom Harper, who directed the first season of Peaky Blinders as well as the BBC’s War and Peace and the historical adventure The Aeronauts.
The full returning cast includes Stephen Graham as Hayden Stagg, Packy Lee as Johnny Dogs, Ned Dennehy as Uncle Charlie, and Sophie Rundle as Ada. Jay Lycurgo and Ian Peck also appear.
It runs 1 hour and 52 minutes. It premiered at Symphony Hall in Birmingham on March 3, the city where Tommy Shelby was born, and went into limited theatrical release on March 6.
What The Reviews Say
The critical response has been broadly positive with meaningful reservations, landing somewhere between enthusiastic fan service and a slightly uneven but genuinely cinematic send-off.
Variety called Keoghan “almost too predictably perfect in the part” — a character who is “a bratty teenage nihilist at heart” that Keoghan’s “unsettling skew-whiff presence” fits exactly.
The review described Murphy’s performance as finding “just the right temperature to keep audiences on side. He’s a psycho, sure, but one with a soul,” and praised the film as a “handsome reminder of what always felt quite cinematic about the series.”
MovieWeb called it “a stunning gangster epic” that “exceeded expectations,” saying Murphy and Keoghan are “riveting together” and praising Knight and Harper for “skillfully serving each master.”
NME called the film “sombre” but said it “wraps things up as tightly as a burial shroud,” singling out the production design, the use of Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand.
IndieWire was more measured, describing it as “anchored by Murphy and Keoghan’s impeccable performances and father-son chemistry” but “an unsteady trip down memory lane” that “sometimes creeps into silliness.”
The AV Club was the harshest, calling it “a superfluous swing for finale-style pathos” and arguing the film offers nothing new to fans while being impenetrable to newcomers.
The audience response, however, has been notably warmer. IMDB early audience scores sit at 7.8, with multiple premiere attendees describing the screening as one of the most intense theatrical experiences of their lives.
Murphy On Tommy, Fame, And Staying Quiet
The CBS News interview, filmed in the North London neighborhood where Murphy lived with his family for over a decade, caught him at an unusual moment of visibility.
He is 49 years old, an Oscar winner, the star of one of Netflix’s most beloved franchises, and constitutionally uncomfortable with all of it.
“The less that people know about you, the more you can inhabit a character,” he told CBS News.
“And just portray that character as honestly and convincingly as possible. And inevitably, that becomes a little bit eroded, I suppose, if you’re in more high-profile work, but you try and preserve it as best as you can.”
He lives in Ireland with his wife, artist Yvonne McGuinness, and their two sons, now 18 and 20.
He runs. He walks the dog. He goes to the pub. He stays offline. He was the unwitting subject of a viral internet meme, the face of looking “over it,” and has approximately zero interest in it.
When CBS News asked about his eyes and cheekbones being widely commented on, he rolled his eyes. “Well, I mean, what can I do with that? I don’t pay any attention to that, honestly. Just try and make the work. That’s not something you can control, is it?”
On the Oscar, Murphy told CBS, “You just feel very humbled to be in that club, I suppose. I don’t think about it very often.”
On the adage in show business about not quitting a hit, he said, “I think that is correct. If something’s working, audiences love it, the writing is good, you’re still enjoying it, don’t quit it.”
What Comes Next For Murphy?
Netflix has already made a deal for a Peaky Blinders sequel series — a next-generation continuation of the franchise that will extend the story beyond The Immortal Man.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in select theaters now. It arrives on Netflix on March 20, 2026
