Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man: A Tom Hardy Twist That Was Scrapped
Cillian Murphy and Steven Knight attend the "Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man" Global Premiere at Symphony Hall on March 02, 2026 in Birmingham, England.
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[This story contains major spoilers for Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.]
A couple weeks before Breaking Bad came to an end in 2013, another impeccably written crime drama premiered across the pond on BBC Two. Like Vince Gilligan’s series, this show also had an unusual title with a towering lead performance at its center. And within a year, a streaming deal with Netflix helped turn it into a global phenomenon just as the streamer had done for Bad midway through its basic-cable run. The show in question was Steven Knight’s Peaky Blinders, starring Cillian Murphy.
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Of course, the late 2000s Albuquerque, New Mexico where Bryan Cranston’s Walter White built a meth empire is a far cry from the post-World War I Birmingham, England where Murphy’s Tommy Shelby turned the Peaky Blinders street gang into a notorious criminal organization with legitimate financial and political power. But there are still a number of similarities between the two successful drama series that are laced with dark comedy and populated with sympathetic criminals.
Echoing Gilligan’s El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, Knight now has his own sequel movie to his beloved series. Written by the series creator and directed by Tom Harper, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man aims to provide Tommy with the inner peace that’s eluded him since he returned home from his harrowing experience as a tunneler in WWI. The story picks up in 1940, six years after the end of the mothership series. Tommy has secluded himself in his dilapidated countryside mansion to simmer in guilt and write his memoir, all while his estranged son, Duke Shelby (Barry Keoghan), runs the Peaky Blinders with reckless abandon.
The nihilistic Duke is soon recruited by Nazi Germany to crash the British economy through the distribution of counterfeit currency and effectively decide World War II for the German Reich. Thus, Tommy’s sister, Ada (Sophie Rundle), and Kaulo Chiriklo (Rebecca Ferguson), the twin sister of Duke’s mother, separately implore Tommy to save his son and Gypsy people by extension. Tommy eventually does so by applying his methodical genius to foil the Nazi plan. However, he still catches a couple bullets in the gut from a Nazi agent (Tim Roth’s John Beckett), prompting a dying Tommy to ask Duke to ease his pain once and for all.
Knight says that he and Murphy always envisioned the film to be the last ride of Tommy Shelby. And for a show that became a fan-engineered sensation after a sluggish start out of the gate, it was important to offer those very fans a chance to feel the emotion of Tommy’s death by way of a theatrical experience. Consistent with most of Netflix’s high-priority films, The Immortal Man received a two-week release in boutique and independent theaters before its March 20 debut on the platform.
“The ending where we say farewell to Tommy, having watched it in a couple of theaters now at premieres and screenings, people really get emotional about it. You can hear them sobbing, and that’s exactly what should happen,” Knight tells The Hollywood Reporter. “That [communal experience] should be our way of saying farewell so that the fans can share that emotion in person and say goodbye to the character that they have obviously really responded to.”
Peaky produced a litany of memorable characters throughout its six seasons, leading fans to wonder who would appear in the movie. Chief among them was Tom Hardy’s fan-favorite character of Alfie Solomons, the Camden Town gang leader and frenemy of Tommy. Murphy and Hardy had a limited amount of interactions across three Christopher Nolan movies — Inception, The Dark Knight Rises and Dunkirk — but Knight gave them numerous show-stopping scenes that still make the rounds on social media. Their fictional relationship was so combative that Tommy actually killed Alfie at the end of Peaky season four, at least until Hardy lobbied Knight to keep him around for seasons five and six.
Season five revealed that Alfie survived Tommy’s gunshot to the cheek and that he was pretending to be dead still. But what’s notable about their three scenes across the last two seasons is that only Tommy and Alfie interacted wi