Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight brings the story of Tommy Shelby to a poetic conclusion in new film The Immortal Man – but he had some difficulty figuring out the right way to end.
The following will contain spoilers for the Peaky Blinders movie, so turn back now if you're not up to date.
In the film, Shelby takes two bullets to the stomach, and asks his son, Barry Keoghan's Duke, to finish him and take his place as leader of the Peaky Blinders. You can read more about the moment in our Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man ending explained.
"No, I was trying to work that out," Knight told Variety, when he asked if he always knew how Shelby would die. "I was having trouble with that one, because Tommy Shelby said in the series the only person who can kill Tommy Shelby is Tommy Shelby. But I didn't want that to happen. And then it just suddenly became quite clear."
Knight added that moment of clarity was "probably about a minute before I wrote it," and added of why it had to be Duke who pulled the trigger: "That's got to be the way it happens. Because it's about succession and legacy, and Tommy Shelby has always had a very curious relationship with life and death. He's always on that tightrope – in the words of Keats, he’s half in love with easeful death – since the First World War.
"And it's not just that he's probably mortally wounded," he continued. "It's the conclusion of what his journey is: that he's going to go and join his family and join Grace, and do that. And the fact that he asked [Duke] to use the bullet with the name on makes it part of the tradition of the succession to power for his son."
"For me, for sure," Cillian Murphy recently told us of whether the film is the end of his journey as Tommy Shelby. "I think Steven [Knight, creator] and the universe of Peaky Blinders can continue, you know, and I'm sure it will. But it's been a quarter of my life playing this character, and that's an awfully long time by anyone's standards. But a deeply satisfying one. I felt we managed to achieve something with the TV show and that each season became richer and deeper, and we never plateaued, which I think is a trick to pull off. And therefore, above all, I wanted it to be a present to the fans, like a return on their investment."
But, a '50s set spin-off is on the way and is currently filming – so the story of the Peaky Blinders isn't over yet.
The Immortal Man is streaming on Netflix now. You can fill out your watchlist with our guide to the best Netflix movies.
