Tim Roth as the Peaky Blinders story shifts into World War II, after the Netflix debut
Tim Roth is now part of the spotlight around “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, ” the nearly two-hour sequel film that brings Thomas “Tommy” Shelby back to the screen as the story pivots into World War II (ET).
What Happens When “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man” moves Tommy Shelby into a Nazi-era plot?
“Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man” debuts on Netflix on March 20 (ET) after playing in select theaters, resuming the story of Tommy Shelby, the Birmingham crime boss played by Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy. The original series, launched in 2013 and set in England in the wake of World War I, ran for six seasons and ended on a cliffhanger in 2022, with Shelby surviving a failed assassination.
Screenwriter Steven Knight has described the sequel’s central shift plainly: it is set during the Second World War, placing Tommy Shelby against the Nazis, framed as “the enemy at the time in the 1940s. ” That change in backdrop re-anchors the franchise’s gangland drama in a different kind of threat environment—one where the story’s criminal underworld is forced to collide with wartime politics and ideology rather than only local power struggles.
Within that context, Tim Roth is being discussed alongside the film’s return to Shelby’s world, even as the core described on-screen engine remains Murphy’s continuation as Tommy Shelby.
What If the film’s “real-life inspiration” lens reshapes how viewers read the sequel?
While both the series and the film are fictional, Knight has said the Shelby clan drew inspiration from second-hand stories of the real-life Peaky Blinders: an elegantly dressed, badly behaved band of British criminals. The creative seed, as Knight has recalled, came from his father’s childhood memory of delivering a message to sharply groomed gangsters seated around a table piled with cash—an image of smoke, booze, and immaculate clothes in a Birmingham slum that became “the mythology” and the first picture he developed into a story.
The historical Peaky Blinders were active in Birmingham in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period described as one of rapid urbanization alongside unemployment and widespread poverty—conditions that fed a violent criminal underbelly. They were working-class men in their teens and early 20s, defined in popular memory by a blend of style and menace.
That historical framing matters because it pushes the franchise beyond a single character’s arc: it invites viewers to interpret the sequel’s wartime turn as an extension of the same theme—how social and economic pressure, mythmaking, and power all braid together. Tim Roth being attached to the conversation around the film will be read through that established lens of myth versus reality, especially as the sequel arrives with high anticipation and a clear shift in era.
What Happens When the Peaky Blinders “razor blade” myth collides with expert skepticism?
One of the franchise’s most persistent legends is that the gang’s name came from sewing razor blades into their caps and using them to slice or blind enemies. The series helped immortalize that idea, but experts have challenged it as unlikely. Birmingham historian Carl Chinn has argued that razor blades were only beginning to appear from the 1890s and were luxury items, making them too expensive for the real Peaky Blinders to use. Chinn has also noted practical doubts, saying it would be difficult to get direction and power with a razor blade sewn into the soft part of a cap.
An alternative explanation described by scholars is more grounded in clothing and slang: the “peaky” cap may have been worn tilted over one eye to obscure faces and avoid identification, while “blinder” was used to describe someone with a dazzling appearance. The gang’s wardrobe—cravats, bell-bottom trousers, steel-capped boots, tailored jackets, and silk scarves—signaled a “degenerate-dandy” aesthetic replicated on-screen.
Scholars have also described that luxe uniform as serving multiple purposes at once: separating the Peaky Blinders from other gangs, displaying wealth and status, and taunting police who could identify members but struggled to stop them. In the historical account summarized, the gang leveraged fear and bribery to exert major economic, political, and social control over Birmingham.
As viewers head into the sequel’s World War II framing, those competing narratives—stylized myth versus documented constraints—remain part of what makes the franchise’s world feel both larger-than-life and historically adjacent. Tim Roth enters that moment as attention concentrates on how “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man” balances gangster mythology with the wartime stakes described for Tommy Shelby.
