Barry Keoghan: Peaky Blinders movie recruits Oscar nominee and Saltburn star

Peaky Blinders might be set in the West Midlands of England but it sure knows how to attract the very best of Irish lads.

Barry Keoghan has joined the cast of the upcoming movie, setting him up with fellow countryman Cillian Murphy.

A Peaky Blinders movie had been flagged as early as 2021 when series creator Steven Knight revealed the show’s sixth season would be its last. The official green light didn’t come until this year.

At the same time, Murphy confirmed he would return to his role as Tommy Shelby, the leader of the crime family that ruled the Birmingham streets.

Plot and character details of the film remain under wraps, including who Keoghan is slated to play. In addition to the two Irish actors, Swedish actor Rebecca Ferguson had earlier been added to the cast.

Knight had previously suggested the story would be set during World War II. When the sixth season ended, it was the mid-1930s which meant there would be a time jump, as there had been between every season. Knight’s original plan was for the series timeline to straddle the two world wars.

He will write and produce the film for Netflix, with BBC Films serving as a co-production partner.

Tom Harper, who had previously directed episodes of Peaky Blinders as well as films Wild Rose and Heart of Stone, will helm the movie. Production is expected to commence later this year.

At the time of the film’s confirmation, Knight promised that the film would be “an explosive chapter in the Peaky Blinders story. No holds barred. Full-on Peaky Blinders at war”.

The series premiered in 2013 and its popularity was supercharged when it was added to Netflix internationally. It’s centred on a crime gang in the aftermath of World War I.

Keoghan started his career in Ireland over a decade ago but broke out with an unnerving performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Killing of a Sacred Deer in which he played a young man who terrorises a family opposite Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell.

He followed that up with roles in crime drama American Animals and Christopher Nolan’s war epic Dunkirk, and was in the ensemble of Marvel movie Eternals.

He nabbed an Oscar nomination in Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, reuniting with Farrell, and gained international attention as the lead of Emerald Fennell’s divisive Saltburn in which he portrayed a young man seemingly from an impoverished background befriending a classmate from an aristocratic family.

On TV, Keoghan has appeared in Chernobyl, Top Boy and Masters of the Air.