Warning: This article contains spoilers from Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.
Don’t let the title fool you: Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) isn’t immortal. But he has always had a unique relationship with death.
“From the beginning of creating this character, I wanted someone who didn’t care if he lived or died,” Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight tells Entertainment Weekly. “That’s his superpower.”
It’s one Knight traces back to Tommy and his brother’s being in No Man’s Land during WWI, convinced they were going to die. “They start singing ‘in the bleak midwinter,’ and then they don’t die,” Knight says. “And so from then on, everything after that is a bonus: ‘We died on that field, but now we’ve been given this time. We can do what we want cause we’re already dead.'”
For Tommy, that bonus life has lasted for six seasons and now a movie, but at the end of The Immortal Man, he finally meets his end. And according to Knight, Tommy was always going to die. “I thought, to end it, he’s gonna have to go,” he says.
Barry Keoghan as Duke and Cillian Murphy as Tommy in ‘Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man’
Credit: Netflix
The film first finds Tommy attempting to live a quiet life in the countryside. Devastated from killing his own brother Arthur (Paul Anderson), he’s tormented by the many ghosts in his life. For the first time, audiences see the gangster with gray hair. “That was something that Cillian was really insistent upon,” Knight reveals. “He wanted to look like time had aged him. It’s been six years since the end of the last series, and he’s had a bit of a hard time, so the gray hairs have come.”
When gypsy queen Kaulo (Rebecca Ferguson) visits him, she convinces him to return to Birmingham to help his son Duke (Barry Keoghan), who’s taking the Peaky Blinders down a bad path. But when his sister Ada (Sophie Rundle) is killed, Tommy shifts his focus to killing the man who hurt his family.
So, for the last time, Tommy hatches a plan, filled with guns, explosives, and everything he needs to avenge his sister and save his son. And in a full-circle moment, we watch as Tommy removes his suit and returns to dusty underground tunnels, facing his PTSD head-on. “I wanted to reflect the fact that where he was forged was in the tunnels in the first World War, and the fact that he has to go back there and it’s his biggest fear,” Knight says. “He confronts his biggest fear, and he sort of triumphs over that. And it’s almost like before he dies, he has to sort that one out.”
Sort it out, he does, killing Beckett (Tim Roth), saving Duke, and then dying in his son’s arms. Finally, Tommy Shelby is free, as he was always intended to be.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in select theaters and available on Netflix.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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