Tommy Shelby has always carried himself like a man who can outthink fate. That is part of the seduction of Peaky Blinders. He walks into a room looking calm, and somehow makes everyone else seem two steps behind. But the deeper truth of the story has never been Tommy’s control. It has been the cost of chasing it.
That is why Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man feels like such a fitting title for this world. The movie brings Cillian Murphy back as Tommy, forcing him back to Birmingham and back into the family’s orbit. Barry Keoghan appears as Duke Shelby. Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Roth, and others round out a cast that makes the whole thing feel both bigger and more haunted.
Tommy Came Home From War Already Marked
Tommy was never introduced as a normal gangster who slowly turned dark. He arrived broken.
From the first season, the show made it clear that World War I never ended for him. The tunnels, the noise, the waiting, the numbness, all of it stayed lodged inside him. That matters because Tommy’s relationship to death begins there. He does not fear it in the ordinary way, because part of him has already gone there and come back. That makes him brilliant. It also makes him reckless.
You can see it in how often he gambles with his own life. He pushes negotiations too far. He provokes bigger enemies than he needs to. He treats survival almost like a technical detail. For Tommy, death is not a distant possibility. It is always sitting at the table, and he has learned to work beside it.
That is part of why people follow him, too. Men like Arthur, John, Johnny Dogs, and even rivals can sense that Tommy is operating with a different tolerance for risk. He does not behave like someone trying to preserve a peaceful life. He behaves like someone who already lost that chance years ago.
Every Rise in Tommy’s Life Leaves a Body Behind
One of the most unsettling things about Peaky Blinders is how often success and grief arrive together.
Tommy expands the business, and someone dies. Tommy wins politically, and someone pays for it. Tommy protects the family, and the family ends up bloodier than before. The series never lets power feel clean. It keeps insisting that Tommy’s talent has a terrible shadow attached to it.
That is why death feels less like bad luck and more like a pattern. Grace dies, and the emotional center of Tommy’s life collapses. John dies, and the family loses one of its most instinctive, loyal forces. Polly dies, and the entire moral weather of the story changes. Even when Tommy survives, the people around him absorb the impact. It is almost as if the show keeps asking the same question in different forms. What good is a mastermind if everyone he loves gets dragged into the blast radius?
And honestly, that may be the cruelest part of Tommy Shelby as a character. He often believes he is protecting people while steering them toward danger. He is not evil in the cartoonish sense. He is worse for drama, and better for television. He is a man whose gifts are inseparable from the harm they create.
Tommy Treats Death Like an Opponent He Can Bargain With
Most characters in crime dramas either fear death or romanticize it. Tommy does something stranger. He negotiates with it.
He acts as if one more deal, one more plan, one more sacrifice will let him stay ahead of the bill coming due. Sometimes he frames that as duty. Sometimes as ambition. Sometimes as love. But underneath all of those things is the same private fantasy that he can manage the chaos if he is cold enough, clever enough, and willing enough to pay in blood.
That fantasy has driven the entire series. It is also why the idea of Tommy being “immortal” is so ironic. Tommy Shelby has never looked immortal because he is untouched. He looks immortal because he keeps surviving things that should have destroyed him. Those are not the same thing.
Survival, in his case, has usually meant carrying more ghosts.
The Family Itself Has Become Haunted
The movie’s premise also sharpens this theme in a smart way. Tommy is pulled back when Duke, his estranged son, is drawn into a Nazi conspiracy, which means the next generation is now trapped in the same machinery of violence, ideology, and inheritance. That alone tells you something important. Tommy may have changed, aged, vanished, returned, and reinvented himself, but death is still following the Shelby line.
Duke is especially important here because he represents the legacy Tommy cannot control. That has always been the real horror in Peaky Blinders. Not simply that Tommy might die, but that his way of living keeps reproducing itself. Violence becomes inheritance. Distance becomes inheritance. The family name becomes inheritance. Even the mythology becomes inheritance.
That is why Tommy’s story has never been just about whether he escapes. Escape for what? To become peaceful? To become ordinary? The series has spent years showing that Tommy does not really know how to live outside conflict. So when death follows him, it is not only because enemies want him dead. It is because he keeps building a world where death remains useful, profitable, and close at hand.
The Movie Gives That Old Pattern a Larger Stage
Everything known about The Immortal Man suggests the film leans into wartime pressure, family fracture, and Tommy’s return to a city and a life he cannot fully quit. That is very much in line with what Peaky Blinders has always understood about him. Tommy does not move in straight lines. He circles back to the places where history, guilt, and violence are waiting.
It also helps that the film arrives with a cast built for menace and unease. Murphy still makes Tommy feel like a man carrying private thunder. Keoghan as Duke adds volatility. Rebecca Ferguson and Tim Roth bring exactly the kind of presence this franchise likes, people who seem dangerous even when standing still. If the story feels like Tommy is once again surrounded by death in personal, political, and historical forms, that is because this franchise has never separated those things very neatly.
Death has always followed Tommy Shelby because he has spent his whole life walking toward it. That is the tragedy. It is also the reason people cannot stop watching him. Tommy has the face of a survivor, but the soul of a man who has been in conversation with death for a very long time. The Immortal Man works best when you read it through that lens. Tommy was never escaping the darkness. He was simply learning how to keep moving inside it.
Rachel Sikkema is a New Zealand-based writer and creative entrepreneur who explores the intersection of film, culture, and modern relationships. Through her articles, she examines how stories shape the way we connect, love and see ourselves. When she’s not writing about film and television, she’s watching Dexter and The White Lotus for the third time.