'Peaky Blinders' Creator Steven Knight Says the Movie's Cast is "Mindblowing"
The sixth and final season of Peaky Blinders may have ended back in 2022, but the story isn't quite over for Tommy Shelby and his Birmingham gang. Rather than concluding their run on television, the last chapter of the Peaky Blinders's tale will take place on film, show creator Steven Knight confirmed in 2021. "Covid changed our plans. But I can say that my plan from the beginning was to end Peaky with a movie," he told Deadline at the time. "That is what is going to happen."
Since then, news about the production has been scant, but in June 2024 we received official confirmation: the Peaky Blinders movie has been greenlit at Netflix. Cillian Murphy is on board to reprise his role as the beleaguered gang leader, and will also produce. Tom Harper, who directed for season one of the series, will take on the directing role, with a script by Knight. Production is slated to begin later this year.
“This is one for the fans,” Murphy said in a statement. "It seems like Tommy Shelby wasn’t finished with me … It is very gratifying to be re-collaborating with Steven Knight and Tom Harper on the film version of Peaky Blinders."
More recently, trickles of casting information have begun to emerge, and at a convention in September, Knight promised that there are plenty of surprises to come. “We’ve announced Rebecca Ferguson, we’ve announced Barry Keoghan, we’ve got some more announcements coming,” he said at The Royal Television Society's London event. Dune's Ferguson first joined the cast in July, followed by Saltburn star Keoghan in August. Thus far, information about the characters they will play has not been revealed.
Here's everything else we know so far about the upcoming movie:
Filming will begin in 2024
Audiences have already been waiting quite a while to get the ultimate conclusion to the show, but things seem to be moving closer to finally getting the Shelby gang on the big screen.
Way back in 2022, Knight confirmed to British radio station Heart FM that he was close to finishing the script for the movie. At the time, he said that the film would be shooting in Birmingham, and echoed his previous assessment that production will likely begin "within 18 months."
"We’re going to shoot it at the studios in Digbeth, and on location in Digbeth in Birmingham," he said, per Deadline. "Digbeth and Small Heath [are] where the Peaky Blinders actually roamed, so it’s like Peaky’s coming home."
That timeline clearly didn't hold up, as Knight was apparently still putting the finishing touches on the script when he spoke to Radio Times in late 2023. "I’m just working on the final bits of it at the moment," he said in the magazine's Christmas issue. He later added, "The plan is to start shooting that in the middle of next year."
Now it seems that things are indeed on track. Knight told BirminghamWorld in March 2024 that filming would commence in September, and at the time of the movie's confirmation at Netflix, Deadline reported that filming would begin in 2024. Given that, it seems likely that the movie itself wouldn't hit screens until 2025 at the earliest, but thus far no official dates have been announced.
Who will appear in the film?
As with plot details, we don't know much about who will be included in the film's cast beyond Ferguson and Keoghan, but Cillian Murphy will be returning as Tommy. Knight has also previously stated that Paul Anderson will reprise his role as Tommy's brother Arthur.
When asked whether the two actors would be returning to the broader Peaky universe of potential spin-offs, he told Digital Spy in February 2022, "It's impossible to say yet. But the film—yes." He added, "There are so many people, so many great actors, that we are already, sort of, in conversation with for the film, and for whatever follows. But I think what we want to do is keep surprising people, and keep breaking new talent. Because it's all out there, and there is a sort of consistency— what we're doing is finding really good actors from a working-class sort of background, and telling that story. That's what we're trying to do."
Murphy himself was circumspect on the matter for quite some time, keeping fans on the edge of their seats. He told Radio Times in July 2023, "I would love to do a movie if there’s more story to tell. I’ll wait and see, but I have no update for you on that."
What will the film be about?
It's not currently clear what plotlines we can expect to see in the Peaky Blinders movie, or even what year it might be set in, but Knight's statement when the film was announced at Netflix in June 2024 seems to confirm his previous plan to have the film take place, at least in part, during WWII.
“I’m genuinely thrilled that this movie is about to happen. It will be an explosive chapter in the Peaky Blinders story. No holds barred. Full on Peaky Blinders at war,” the creator said at the time.
In September 2024, he confirmed, “It’s set in the second world war and it’s really good.”
Back in 2018, Knight had told fans that the original intent was to film a seventh season of the television show, with an eye to even more seasons down the road. "My ambition is to make it a story of a family between two wars, so I always wanted to end it with the first air raid siren in 1939," he said then.
However, in early 2022, he revealed that those plans had changed. "I… have revised the scope of what it is. It will now go into and beyond the Second World War," he told Empire. "Because I just think the energy that is out there in the world for this, I want to keep it going, and I want to see how this can progress beyond that." He added, “I think of this sixth series as the end of the beginning."
Will there be more Peaky Blinders?
In late 2021, Knight said on a BFI London Film Festival panel that the movie "will probably be the sort of the end of the road for Peaky Blinders as we know it," which sounds like he plans for the film to be a definitive end to the story. However he has also hinted that it might not be the last bow for the Peaky universe at large. "We're talking about... I don't like the word spin-offs, but TV series that are going to be inspired by and include characters from Peaky," he told BBC News in 2021, adding to Variety, "there will be other TV shows that I hope will come out of [it], that will continue to tell the story of this part of society and this family."
There's been no word on what those potential shows might be, but Knight has indicated that he would likely pass on the writing duties to someone else for new entries into the Peaky universe.
In September 2022 the show did carry on in one unexpected way: Knight, in collaboration with Rambert Production, Birmingham Hippodrome, and The Lowry, put up a dance production in the Peaky Blinders universe, titled Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby. The show was directed and choreographed by Benoit Swan Pouffer and followed "Tommy Shelby and Grace Burgess through their passionate love affair."
While we wait for the Peaky Blinders film, watch all six seasons of Peaky Blinders on Netflix. Watch now
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