Peaky Blinders movie director teases mysterious Rebecca Ferguson "harbinger" role in film

While upcoming Peaky Blinders film The Immortal Man sees several familiar faces from the hit TV show reprising their iconic roles, there are also a fair few starry additions to the cast – including Barry Keoghan as Tommy Shelby's son Duke and Tim Roth as a new antagonist named Beckett.

Meanwhile, one of the most exciting new cast members is Rebecca Ferguson, with the Dune and Mission: Impossible star set to play a mysterious character named Kaulo who comes face to face with Cillian Murphy's Tommy.

Very little has been revealed about the character ahead of the film's release, but those who have viewed the most recent trailer for the film will have heard her giving an ominous warning to Tommy that suggests she knows rather a lot about him and his failings.

And speaking exclusively to Radio Times at the film's premiere in Birmingham on Monday 2 March, director Tom Harper revealed that the relationship between Tommy and Kaulo was one of the things he'd most enjoyed about making the movie.

Asked which parts he'd most looked forward to directing and which dynamics he'd most wanted to dig into, he responded: "I love the dynamic that Rebecca brings. And she kind of goes toe to toe with Tommy.

"She is able to... she's like a harbinger," he added. "She brings all sorts of complicated things."

That certainly sounds intriguing, and fans might well suspect that the nature of Ferguson's character could tie into Murphy's recent comments that the film would see Tommy embrace "the sort of gypsy magic" more than he's done before.

"[That] was very much the world of Aunt Polly," he explained at a recent Q&A hosted by Edith Bowman at the BFI.

"Whereas before he would've been brought up with that and understood it, as he's gotten older, that's what he really feels is actually – forget about progress and science and all that, this stuff is where the real source of life exists," he said.

Ferguson spoke to Radio Times about joining the cast for the film last year, revealing that she'd been looking for a chance to work with Murphy for a long time before this opportunity came up.

"We have the same agent," she said. "So I've been constantly calling saying, ‘What's up? What's going on? What are we doing?’ So when this came it was a no brainer for me."

On the experience of joining such a well loved series, she added: "What's fun is coming into a world that is so sedimented, it's so rooted, it has such a profound following, it's quite scary. So, yeah, it was an honour, the fact that they trusted me to do it – because it's a huge movie."

Meanwhile, director Harper is returning to the Peaky Blinders world more than a decade after he helmed three episodes of the very first season back in 2013.

"I mean it was the same and different," he said about returning. "One of the main reasons I came back to it was because I really loved working with Steve and with Cillian and lots of other craft and crew when I was doing it way back when.

"But we never realised the phenomenon that it would become. We knew there was something special about it. We knew there was some magic in the acting and the writing or the combination of it. But we never knew what it would become. So to be here now selling it for the big screen, with all the cinematic ambition that we always had for it, is fantastic."

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. Peaky Blinders series is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

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