Peaky Blinders' Cillian Murphy talks casting his "acting hero" in the film – as writer reveals how this impacted villainous role

Tommy Shelby has had to face a great number of adversaries in his time – from Sam Neill's corrupt cop Major Campbell to Adrien Brody's New York mob boss Luca Changretta – but in new Peaky Blinders spin-off film The Immortal Man, the Birmingham gangster faces perhaps his biggest threat yet.

That threat comes in the shape of Tim Roth's Beckett, a man who tries to recruit Tommy's son Duke into a real-world scheme that would have helped Nazi Germany win the war by flooding the UK with counterfeit money.

Speaking exclusively to Radio Times about the new foe at the film's Birmingham premiere last night (Monday 2 March), Murphy explained what set Beckett apart from his previous enemies.

"He seems quite innocuous, but he's deadly," he explained. "Tim Roth is one of my favourite actors, and we'd worked together before, and I was able to ask him to come and play in this one. He's brilliant in the film!"

Murphy went into a little more detail about his admiration for Roth's career during an appearance at a Q&A at the BFI last Friday (27 February), explaining how he had been "an acting hero of mine growing up".

He said: "Even before I became an actor his films were massive for me. I once gave him an award in Dublin and embarrassed him, just spoke about every film. And then I was lucky enough to make a film with him about 10 years ago, a smaller film called Broken."

He added that they'd often spoken about working together again, and so when Steven Knight wrote the character of Beckett he immediately suggested Roth for the role.

"And he said yes," he recalled. "That's what you get with brilliant writing, actors are like magnets to it. He said yes straight away and then he had this different take, which was interesting."

That change to the character saw Roth persuade Knight that rather than being a posh, more aristocratic man – as he had initially been written – he should come from a similar background to Tommy himself.

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"We did a Zoom and he said, maybe he's not an officer, maybe he's not a toff, maybe he's infantry, maybe he's a working class man," Knight explained to Radio Times. "So that really was fantastic."

Murphy agreed that this interpretation worked wonders for the film and the dynamic between the two characters.

"It made them kind of the opposite sides of the one coin," he said. "Which is brilliant."

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is released in cinemas 6 March. The movie will stream on Netflix from 20 March – sign up from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media. The Peaky Blinders series is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

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