Peaky Blinders icon Cillian Murphy: "I do believe in generational trauma, I also believe it can be stopped"
Cillian Murphy takes the reins for the Peaky Blinders feature film. But what’s the appeal of playing an antihero – and is this the end of Tommy Shelby?
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Tommy Shelby has been in our heads for 13 years, but even longer in Cillian Murphy’s.
British TV viewers first encountered the Birmingham gangster in September 2013, when he rode a black stallion through the streets of 1919 Small Heath.
For Murphy, presently sitting opposite me in a London hotel suite, the introduction came months before that, when he first opened Steven Knight’s script and realised Shelby was a part in a million.
“I could tell that it was special,” says Murphy, a glossy amalgam of expensively barbered hair and radiant skin that belies his 49 years. “I read the opening sequence where he rides into Birmingham. That wordless, western style, it was instantly iconic, if that’s not an oxymoron. So bold and so confident. I knew I wanted to do it.”
Murphy compares Peaky Blinders to a motorbike ride where, “Tommy Shelby is driving the motorbike and I’m in the sidecar going, ‘OK man, I trust you,’ and then he’s off. Very quickly I became the passenger and he became the driver.”
Is it usual to be taken over like that? “I’ve never had it with any other character,” he admits. “You give yourself up to it. Something happens, some exchange of atoms. I couldn’t just put his flat cap on and step into it; every time we’d do a series it would be, ‘OK, three months of prep and then getting back into it. I don’t know how I’m going to do that again.’ But then you do it, you’re in the groove and every time Tommy became more a part of me. It’s a strange experience.”
And now, perhaps, it is coming to an end. “Steve and I explored how you bring this thing to a conclusion,” Murphy says of the discussions the two men had before The Immortal Man, the Knight-scripted Peaky Blinders feature film, which Murphy stars in and co-produces. “We have a weird symbiotic thing. Steve is preternaturally gifted. If you throw an idea at him, he throws it back infinitely better.” Can that be a little annoying? “No, it’s wonderful!”
The film is widely predicted to offer a final redemption for Shelby who, it must be said, has done a lot that needs redeeming.
“Steve has always said that Tommy is a good man doing bad things to a good end,” says Murphy.
Still, if we don’t include German soldiers in the First World War, Shelby has killed around 15 people, ordered the deaths of more and, for much of the time, run a relentlessly criminal business model. “But it’s not surprising that people love flawed anti-heroes,” says Murphy. “There are a lot of people you really want to hate, but you can’t hate. It’s much more interesting to me than the square-jawed hero and the nefarious villain.”
Has that made him more sympathetic to the bad people he meets in real life – after 13 years of Tommy, is Murphy a more understanding person? “It’s easy to say that, hypothetically, isn’t it? There’s an awful lot of othering happening in society nowadays. You get ‘They’re the bad people!’ from both sides of the divide and I think it happens very early on with children and teenagers now. It’s very hard if a person is threatening you or compromising your beliefs, but you should always be able to see the child or the human being behind the thug or the so-called villain or gangster.”
Which, year after year, is exactly what Knight did. “Every time I got the scripts for the new season, I’d go, this is great, let’s go. Because Peaky Blinders went deeper as it evolved. It became more confident, its world got bigger but more detailed. And it went into darker places.”
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The film finds Shelby holed up in the remains of his country house, tortured by recent traumas and the loss of his daughter Ruby, who died of tuberculosis aged seven in series six. Writing a memoir that, he hopes, will explain everything (The Immortal Man of the film’s title), Tommy is visited by Kaulo, the Romany aunt of his son Duke, who attempts to cure him with a séance.
“Tommy is disdainful of doctors or modern medicine or anything that is vaguely part of the establishment,” says Murphy. “He is much more interested in a gypsy kind of magic.” Has Murphy encountered magic in his own life? “In that spooky way, no, but I have creatively. Sometimes, when you’re acting, the words hit the air and it just works. Everyone feels it but nobody can define it. I’ve had times where you feel like it’s almost transcendental.”
There is something of that in the scenes between Tommy and Duke (kept apart by Knight until near the dénouement), played by Barry Keoghan. Both are damaged – one by the horrors of combat, the other by the long absence of his father. “I do believe in generational trauma,” says Murphy. “I also believe it can be stopped, that there’s a duty to stop it, or to identify it. Unfortunately for Tommy, I don’t think he’s capable of it because he effectively abandons his son.”
Murphy, born in Cork, denies any deeper significance in he and Keoghan being Irish. “It’s entirely coincidental that we’re Irish actors doing it. But it probably helps, having the old chip on the shoulder.” Is there an Irish attitude both men bring to the work? “I am incredibly proud of being Irish, of my heritage, but as a younger actor I really wanted to not be identified [with Ireland], I wanted to be an actor first and Irish second. To just go off and play American and play English and not be inhibited by my extraction.”
Murphy’s success in doing that reached a zenith in 2024 when he stepped onto the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to accept a golden statuette from a beaming Brendan Fraser. “The whole awards campaign is like an out-of-body experience,” he says of winning the best actor Oscar for Oppenheimer that night. “It’s not real. It’s very hallucinogenic. I’m very grateful for it but it’s so divorced from reality.” Still? “Yes, it’s like something that didn’t happen in real time, some magical kind of dream.”
But then Peaky Blinders has been a dream of sorts – a BBC drama that became a worldwide sensation. “Connecting,” says Murphy, “in a way that none of us could have anticipated.”
Read More:
- Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man review – Big screen spin-off keeps a firm red right hand on proceedings
- Peaky Blinders star breaks silence on major character absence from The Immortal Man film: "It’s something you don’t see on TV"
- Steven Knight explains how Peaky Blinders film ended up quite different from his initial plans
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in select cinemas now and on Netflix from Friday 20 March 2026.
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