Jamie Bell will lead a new Peaky Blinders sequel series, to be set 10 years after the recent film spinoff The Immortal Man.
The as-yet-untitled new show comes from series creator and writer Steven Knight and it will see Billy Elliot and Rocketman star Bell playing Duke Shelby, the son of Cillian Murphy’s Tommy.
According to a press release, the “new era” of the hit BBC and Netflix show will tell the story of “the race to rebuild Birmingham” after the Second World War. “This is a city of unprecedented opportunity and jeopardy,” it teases. “At its blood-soaked heart is Duke Shelby: older, wiser, more ambitious and most certainly more dangerous.”
Duke Shelby was played by Barry Keoghan in The Immortal Man, but Bell will be taking on the role from now on. He will be joined in the new cast by Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things, Industry), Jessica Brown Findlay (Silo, The Flatshare), Lashana Lynch (No Time To Die, The Day Of The Jackal) and Lucy Karczewski (Stereophonic).
The show has been commissioned for two seasons and it is being filmed in Birmingham’s Digbeth Loc Studios. It will air on BBC iPlayer and BBC One in the UK and on Netflix around the world. No release date has been confirmed.
Knight has said: “I am thrilled that we are announcing a new era of Peaky Blinders, moving the story to post-war Birmingham in the early 50s. We are incredibly fortunate to have Jamie Bell taking the role of Tommy Shelby’s oldest son, Duke, and to have Charlie Heaton also leading the cast. There are more exciting cast announcements to come, and Peaky is on the road again.”
The Immortal Man picked up the story after the conclusion of the show’s sixth and final season, and featured a soundtrack with the likes of Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten, Amy Taylor of Amyl & The Sniffers, Nick Cave and Lankum. It is streaming on Netflix now.
In a three-star review of the film, NME wrote: “Perhaps it’s not as emotional as you might hope but this sombre final chapter of Peaky Blinders still wraps things up as tightly as a burial shroud. And for that, we doff our razor-lined caps.”
Knight recently revealed that the film nearly featured Tom Hardy’s character Alfie Solomons as a ghost, and also opened up about why series favourite Paul Anderson didn’t show up in the movie.