Cillian Murphy, Barry Keoghan and the cast of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man on anti-heroes, Nazis, "intrusive thoughts and bad behaviour"

Cillian Murphy has played his share of out-and-out badduns, with villainous roles in Red Eye and Batman Begins — even Oppenheimer had his moments, too. But it’s probably for the walking moral conundrum that is Thomas Shelby that the Oscar winner is still best known, at least in the UK.

For those living under a rock — or very large flat cap -—that’s Peaky Blinders’ sharp-suited Brummie gangster, beloved by the locals, suffering from PTSD, trying to keep his wayward family in check. And now he’s back, in the Netflix feature-length, WW2-era outing The Immortal Man.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man | Official Trailer | Netflix - YouTube

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“The best writing is more complex and contradictory rather than reductively good or bad, and it’s particularly in long-form stuff [like a TV series] that you can properly examine a character in all those contradictions,” enthuses Murphy, as he sits down with Shortlist to discuss his longest-standing role. The film has been written by Steven Knight, who wrote all six seasons of the TV series and is slated to write the next Bond movie, too.

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“On paper Thomas Shelby should fall into the ‘bad man’ category but it’s the humanity in the writing that sets it apart. I always think back to Travis Bickle [in Taxi Driver]. I remember watching that when I was about 15 and not really understanding the historical context — of him being a war veteran and why he was so disillusioned — and yet also finding him so fascinatingly compelling.

"You’re living in his subconscious, where his weird logic makes sense. It’s much more interesting than someone doing the right thing all the time”.

In many ways The Immortal Man is about the effort and cost of trying to do just that. It ties up loose ends from the TV series (sometimes in a revelatory fashion, particularly in relation to the death of Thomas’ brother Arthur, saying no more...) and, akin perhaps to the reboot of the Bond franchise, opens the door for Barry Keoghan to take the lead in any return of Peaky Blinders to the small screen, should that ever happen.

Keoghan plays Shelby’s wayward son Duke — barely yet a man and unable to tell the difference between doing over your gang rivals and profiting by undermining the war effort. His traumatised father has absconded from his responsibilities and hidden away in the countryside to, as one character disparagingly puts it, “write a fookin’ book”. This is a world of grey areas, a home for anti-heroes.

“It’s our job as actors to humanise characters with those isms and behaviours that we can all relate to, though [I think] we also enjoy watching anti-heroes so we can sit back while someone else does on screen that we wouldn’t do ourselves,” Keoghan hypothesises.

“We enjoy it as participants in a way. There’a curiosity to anti-heroes”.

Sins of the father

The Immortal Man is also very much a mediation on parental duties, with switchblades and knuckle dusters. At one point father and son have it out in the mud and shit of a farmyard pig sty. It’s an apt metaphor for Shelby’s Flanders-inflected state of mind — their finery getting coasted in oozing muck, a disturbing watch for any sartorialist —and for the grim reality behind the Peakies' public respectability.

Both Murphy and Keoghan have sons. And, they stress, The Immortal Man is no guidebook on how to do the dad thing well.

“I wouldn’t be going to watch it for parenting lessons,” Murphy laughs.

“This is a highly dysfunctional, broken, twisted relationship [but touches on that theme] of abandonment and the simple thing of just being there for your kids. A big chunk of parenting is being present."

“Yeah definitely don’t do fatherhood [The Immortal Man] way,” Keoghan adds.

“But it is something to understand that your father is a human being. That’s something I took from this”.

That’s a poignant comment too: Keoghan didn’t know his father while growing up and was raised in foster care until he was 12.

"Intrusive thoughts and bad behaviour"

Indeed, in stark contrast to the predictable, typically black and white moral divides of the Marvel super-hero universe, nobody in The Immortal Man is so clear cut. Rebecca Ferguson’s Romanian gypsy (Romanian in part because, Ferguson laughs, “my Birmingham accent is absolutely appalling — I always end up sounding Welsh) uses her charms and some kind of folkloric magic to manipulate our anti-hero to her own ends, but also that of the gypsy people.

“I’m not sure there are any more interesting characters to play [than] the morally complex ones [like that],” she adds, “because that’s what we’re all like. We have intrusive thoughts and bad behaviour — and that’s what makes it fun”.

Even Tim Roth’s traitorous conspirator — guiding a Nazi plan to crash the UK economy with a tonne of counterfeit fivers — is motivated by a big picture plan to save lives. About the only thing he seems absolutely certain about is the need to make absolutely sure that someone is absolutely dead: if there’s a line heading for meme-ification, it’s “Go on, put another one in him!,” as he instructs Duke Shelby to pointedly empty his gun into a body already clearly deceased.

“I’ve done a few [period dramas like this] but I was never really invited along to that party,” Roth comments on the opportunity.

“I came from the wrong place. I didn’t necessarily fit in. And this character was actually originally written for a different class of actor — more 'posh git' — but Cillian asked me and so…”

And what would his father have made of him playing a Nazi? Ernie Roth was a tail-gunner during WW2, “who wouldn’t tell us what he’d seen and who never survived the war, psychologically,” says his son. Remarkably in the 1940s Ernie even changed his surname from Smith to the German-Jewish Roth as a statement of anti-Nazi solidarity — no moral conundrum for him then.

“Oh, he would have approved,” Roth laughs heartily. “I think he came across a few of them”.

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