Peaky Blinders film 'The Immortal Man' holds New York premiere with Cillian Murphy and Barry Keoghan

The DGA Theater on West 57th Street in Manhattan hosted the New York premiere of The Immortal Man on Thursday evening, bringing together the principal cast of Netflix's long-anticipated Peaky Blinders film. Cillian Murphy, Barry Keoghan, Rebecca Ferguson, and Tim Roth attended the event, which took place five days before the film's global Netflix release on March 20. The New York event followed the world premiere held in London earlier this month.

The Immortal Man picks up the Shelby family story after the BBC series concluded its sixth and final season in 2022. Creator Steven Knight wrote the screenplay and has described the film as a standalone chapter rather than a direct continuation of the season six finale, though characters and threads from the series feed into it. The film was shot primarily in Birmingham and at various locations across continental Europe, with production wrapping in mid-2024.

What the cast said at the New York premiere

Murphy spoke briefly to press on the red carpet and said returning to the role of Tommy Shelby for a film format rather than a television series required a different approach to pacing. The series allowed character beats to develop across episodes. A single film compresses that, and Murphy said Knight's script handles the difference by starting the story at a point of crisis rather than building toward one gradually.

Barry Keoghan, whose role in the film has been kept deliberately vague in all official promotional materials, declined to describe his character in specific terms. He told Deadline at the premiere that the secrecy was intentional and that understanding who he plays requires watching the film without foreknowledge. This has been a consistent feature of Netflix's marketing approach for The Immortal Man, which has released two trailers without identifying Keoghan's character by name or faction.

Rebecca Ferguson and Tim Roth on joining the Peaky Blinders world

Both Ferguson and Roth are new to the Peaky Blinders cast, having no roles in the original BBC series. Ferguson, speaking to Variety at the premiere, said she was drawn to the project partly because Steven Knight wrote the female characters in the film with more agency than she typically sees in period crime stories. She plays a character described in official press materials only as a European arms dealer with ties to the Shelby family's wartime history.

Tim Roth plays a British government official whose interests intersect with Tommy Shelby's in ways the promotional materials have not clarified. Roth told the press line at the DGA Theater that he read the script in a single sitting and agreed to join within 48 hours of receiving the offer. He has worked with Knight before on unrelated projects and said the script had a quality of inevitability to it, where each scene felt like the only logical next step.

How the film fits into the broader Netflix strategy for premium IP

Netflix acquired global streaming rights to The Immortal Man as part of a broader agreement with Caryn Mandabach Productions, which produced all six seasons of the BBC series. The financial terms of that agreement have not been publicly disclosed. The deal gives Netflix both the film and the existing six series for streaming outside the UK, where the BBC retains rights. The Peaky Blinders series already had a substantial Netflix viewership before the film was announced, with Season 1 consistently appearing in Netflix's most-watched archive catalog titles in the United States and Germany.

The Immortal Man is one of several IP-continuation films Netflix has committed to in 2025 and 2026, a strategy the company has discussed publicly in investor calls as a way to convert existing subscriber attachment to specific series into event-level viewing moments for the film. The company has not disclosed a production budget for the film, but trade reporting from Production Weekly in early 2024 estimated the budget at approximately 60 to 70 million British pounds based on crew call sheets and location permit filings.

Steven Knight's history with the Peaky Blinders story and what comes after

Knight created Peaky Blinders in 2013 and wrote every episode of the six-season run himself, an unusual level of sole authorship for a long-running prestige drama. He has said in multiple interviews since the series ended that the film was always part of his plan for the story, and that the sixth season finale was specifically written to leave certain questions open rather than close the narrative cleanly. The Immortal Man reportedly answers those questions directly.

Knight told BBC Radio 4 in January 2025 that he has a second film in outline form and that its development depends on the commercial performance of The Immortal Man on Netflix. Netflix measures film performance primarily through hours viewed in the first 28 days after release, a metric it reports publicly in its weekly top ten lists. If The Immortal Man reaches 50 million hours viewed in its first four weeks, it would place among the top 20 English-language Netflix films by that measure, putting a second Shelby family film into a realistic production timeline for 2027 or 2028.