{"id":336997,"date":"2026-03-13T09:53:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T09:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/336997\/"},"modified":"2026-03-13T09:53:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T09:53:12","slug":"cillian-murphy-on-the-peaky-blinders-movie-theres-a-blurring-of-lines-between-me-and-tommy-shelby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/336997\/","title":{"rendered":"Cillian Murphy on the Peaky Blinders movie: \u2018There\u2019s a blurring of lines between me and Tommy Shelby\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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From the moment Cillian Murphy<\/a>\u2019s Tommy Shelby<\/a> first sauntered through a Birmingham slum on horseback in 2013, ash pouring down to the strains of Nick Cave<\/a>\u2019s doom-and-gloom sermon \u201cRed Right Hand\u201d, it was obvious that Peaky Blinders<\/a> was different. A post-First World War gangster drama set in a working-class area of Brum, backlit by factory flames and driven by a brooding, anachronistic soundtrack, it felt impossibly cool, stitching itself into the cultural zeitgeist like a razor blade in the peak of a flat cap. <\/p>\n

There was the imperious Shelby, his ice-blue eyes scything down men with a sniper\u2019s precision. Then there was the haircut \u2013 shaved back and sides, mop on top \u2013 the tweed three-piece suits, the themed pubs, the Monopoly set, the clothing line. Snoop Dogg was a Peaky fan; so, too, was David Bowie, who sent a photograph of himself in the signature flat cap to series\u2019 creator Steven Knight<\/a>. Nobody predicted it would be such a phenomenon, least of all Knight himself. Six series later, having garnered more than six million viewers in its prime, it\u2019s striding into cinemas and onto Netflix with a long-awaited film, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man<\/a>, set in 1940, with Tommy grieving his daughter alone in a remote country pile. <\/p>\n

And yet two of its newest stars have barely watched any of it. Tim Roth<\/a> \u2013 who joins alumni such as Tom Hardy, Adrien Brody and Anya Taylor-Joy \u2013 agreed to The Immortal Man after Murphy himself texted, asking him to take on the role of John Beckett, treasurer of the British Union of Fascists. \u201cI was a bit nervous about telling him I hadn\u2019t seen it,\u201d he says. \u201cBut he laughed \u2013 which is typical Cillian.\u201d Rebecca Ferguson<\/a>, who plays Kaulo Chirklo, Queen of the Palmer Witches, the purportedly supernatural woman determined to lure Tommy back from his self-imposed exile, fared only marginally better. She watched one series. \u201cIt\u2019s six bloody seasons,\u201d she laughs. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Roth was tempted to swot up on the show, he decided against it. \u201cCome in totally fresh, come into their world,\u201d he recalls thinking. Ferguson agrees. If you over-research, she explains, the performance can lose that rawness, that frisson of unpredictability \u2013 \u201cI would turn into something that has already been created.\u201d Roth had a more specific problem to solve. If Beckett is to infiltrate the Peaky Blinders \u2013 by approaching Duke Shelby (Barry Keoghan<\/a>), Tommy\u2019s illegitimate son and successor, with a scheme to spread Nazi counterfeit currency across Birmingham \u2013 he cannot arrive as a posh emissary from the establishment, as Knight had originally written him. \u201cThat posh t*** wouldn\u2019t be able to communicate with these people,\u201d Roth says. So he suggested making Beckett working-class. Knight agreed. Just as well, really. As Beckett, Roth is a study in compressed malice: reptilian and calculating, a Tarantino villain reconfigured as a Whitehall traitor.<\/p>\n

Someone who\u2019d never watched the series could approach this as a standalone<\/p>\n

Cillian Murphy<\/p>\n

Equally impressive is Ferguson. She is at once luminous and glacial, with genuine menace \u2013 a Lady Macbeth in Romany silk. The aunt of Duke Shelby, Kaulo has a tantalising ambiguity: is she genuinely a conduit to the dead, or is it the grift of a master manipulator? Tom Harper, the film\u2019s director, was dazzled by her \u201cmercurial\u201d performance, in which she gives so little away. \u201cShe\u2019s smart and she\u2019s complicated and she\u2019s got a plan,\u201d he says. \u201cDifferent things about her can be true.\u201d Knight agrees.<\/p>\n

If Roth and Ferguson are the new blood, Murphy is still Peaky Blinders\u2019 unquiet heart. The film, picking up six years after the series ended, finds him greyer and hollowed out by grief \u2013 so lost to solipsism that the world has had to come and find him. Grace, his first wife. Ruby, his daughter. Arthur and John, his brothers. Polly, the family matriarch (played by the late Helen McCrory<\/a>, memorialised in the film as a picture in Tommy\u2019s manor). All gone. Just as William Munny, Clint Eastwood\u2019s retired outlaw in the 1992 western Unforgiven, is dragged back into violence by forces that refuse to let him go, so Tommy is the haunted gunslinger who cannot outrun his past. The parallels were intentional, says Knight. \u201cI love that film, and what I love about it is that he doesn\u2019t pull the trigger \u2013 he doesn\u2019t become the person everybody wants him to become until probably 10 minutes from the end.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"Compressed<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Compressed malice: Tim Roth as John Beckett (Netflix)<\/p>\n

No matter how many times he\u2019s inhabited Tommy, Murphy says, preparing for the role is always a conscious effort \u2013 the reading, the conditioning. \u201cBut after a certain point, there is a sort of a blurring of lines between me and him,\u201d he tells me. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t happen instantaneously. But it\u2019s deeply satisfying.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Oscar he won for Oppenheimer in 2024 changed nothing, Murphy insists. \u201cThat was this wonderful, crazy, sort of hallucinogenic moment,\u201d he tells me. \u201cBut my taste and my values had remained the same.\u201d Harper sees a different story. \u201cHe has a power now,\u201d the director says. \u201cIf someone comes in for a day and finds themselves opposite Cillian playing Tommy Shelby, you can see they\u2019re absolutely terrified. It always takes a minute just for them to catch their breath.\u201d<\/p>\n

That power is put to the test by Knight\u2019s plot, which \u2013 as ever with Peaky Blinders \u2013 mines an obscure piece of history. Operation Bernhard: the Nazi scheme to forge \u00a3320m of British currency at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the notes so meticulous that even bank experts couldn\u2019t tell the difference. The Bank of England withdrew \u00a310 notes during the war because of it; after the surrender of Germany, they changed the design entirely. \u201cTrue events are like nails,\u201d Knight says. \u201cYou can hold things up with them.\u201d The bombing of the BSA factory in Birmingham \u2013 another real event, in which 53 workers were killed \u2013 also features. Knight\u2019s mother worked there and wasn\u2019t present the night the bomb fell. \u201cIt was basically the idea,\u201d he says of Operation Bernhard, \u201cthat we can win the war with money.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

A Lady Macbeth in Romany silk: Rebecca Ferguson as Kaulo Chirklo, Queen of the Palmer Witches (Netflix)<\/p>\n

Whether a beloved television series can survive the leap to cinema is another matter. The graveyard is well-populated: Dad\u2019s Army squandered one of Britain\u2019s most beloved comedies in a single afternoon; Luther tried to go large; Sex and the City gave its devotees what they wanted and critics a punching bag. Knight is clear-eyed about the challenge. \u201cLong-form television is like a novel,\u201d he says. \u201cA film is a short story. You have to have a very definite beginning, middle and end. You have to pay things off.\u201d The Immortal Man, he and Murphy insist, welcomes uninitiated viewers. \u201cSomeone who\u2019d never watched it could approach this as a standalone,\u201d Murphy says. \u201cWhich I think is the beauty of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The someone most likely to draw them in is Keoghan. As Duke Shelby, the Dubliner is perfectly cast, exuding a scuzzy, live-wire nihilism that conceals a quiet frailty. There\u2019s a longing for his father\u2019s love and respect that the 33-year-old \u2013 who has spoken about his tumultuous childhood, which included parental addiction and years in foster care \u2013 doesn\u2019t so much perform as carry Duke in his bones. Of the Bafta-winning star of The Banshees of Inisherin and Saltburn, Murphy notes: \u201cHe has that thing where you just put a camera on him, and he\u2019s instantly interesting. He has a sort of dangerous quality to him on camera, but he also has this vulnerability. They are sort of contradictory traits, but he has them all.\u201d Knight is similarly full of praise: \u201cIt\u2019s just a gift from him,\u201d he says. \u201cTotally.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Live-wire:<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Live-wire: Barry Keoghan as Duke Shelby in \u2018The Immortal Man\u2019 (Netflix)<\/p>\n

Keoghan\u2019s trajectory from Summerhill, one of Dublin\u2019s most deprived neighbourhoods, is like a story told in the show. Peaky Blinders was born from Knight\u2019s parents\u2019 tales of Small Heath, where the series is set. It has always been, beneath its besuited, smoke-wreathed mythology, a drama about the cost of being working class. Murphy is clear that this should be reflected in who gets to make it in film. \u201cIt certainly should not in any way be the case that this is an industry exclusively for privileged kids,\u201d he says. \u201cThat would be a terrible reflection on the type of stories we\u2019re trying to tell.\u201d He thinks for a moment. \u201cYouth drama, youth clubs and libraries \u2013 if those places get shut down and kids get locked out, then where do they go? It\u2019s super important that there is an avenue for kids to think that this isn\u2019t an impossibility. That\u2019s the bedrock of it.\u201d <\/p>\n

Roth came up through pub theatre at a moment when Ken Loach, Alan Clarke and Mike Leigh \u2013 artisans of kitchen-sink realism \u2013 were remaking British TV from the inside. \u201cIt coincided with Granada Television and pre-Channel 4,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd all these women, too, were quietly making it happen behind the scenes.\u201d He cites Margaret Matheson, the producer of skinhead drama Made in Britain (1983), Roth\u2019s own television debut. <\/p>\n

\"Back<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Back in the saddle: Cillian Murphy on the set of the Netflix film \u2018Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man\u2019 (Netflix)<\/p>\n

The Immortal Man couldn\u2019t be more timely. The far right is on the march again. In America, in Europe, in Britain. Set against the actual rise of British fascism in the Forties, the film feels less like a period drama than a dispatch from the present. \u201cSadly, it\u2019s a very topical subject,\u201d Knight says. \u201cGood for the film, not good for the world. The political climate is like the weather \u2013 you can\u2019t not know about it, because when you\u2019re sitting there, it\u2019s coming against your window.\u201d Roth needs no prompting. \u201cWatch your back,\u201d he remembers his father saying of the fascists. \u201cThey\u2019re coming for real.\u201d <\/p>\n

It turns out Knight, who is also writing Bond 26 for Denis Villeneuve and Amazon MGM, has already finished the new Peaky series \u2013 set this time in 1953 \u2013 with shooting beginning soon. The Immortal Man, then, is not an ending but a hinge \u2013 the point at which Tommy Shelby stops being a television character and becomes something larger. A reluctant king, as Harper puts it: \u201cThe magnetism of the world is pulling him back in and there is no escape.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2018Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man\u2019 is in cinemas now and is on Netflix from 20 March<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-336997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}