Peaky Blinders: what happened to Arthur?
Arthur Shelby is dead when Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man opens on Netflix — no scenes, no return for Paul Anderson, and an official version of events that the film spends its runtime dismantling. He survived all six series. He doesn't survive the gap between them and the film.
The short answer
Tommy killed him. The film establishes early that Arthur is dead, with the accepted story being an overdose or suicide, and later reveals through flashback and Tommy's own confession that the two brothers fought while Arthur was high and Tommy was drunk, and Tommy strangled him.
How the confession comes out
Rebecca Ferguson's Kaulo, a Romani medium, prods Tommy into admitting he's been lying about how Arthur died. The film shows the night in fragments — a drug-and-drink argument that turns physical, Arthur calling his brother the devil, Tommy deciding he wants to be free of what Arthur has become.
Steven Knight told Entertainment Weekly in 2026 that this is why Tommy has withdrawn from the world when the film picks him up: writing a memoir in an empty house, with only Johnny Dogs still around.
Why Paul Anderson isn't in it
Anderson doesn't appear as Arthur — the flashbacks obscure the character's face and use a double. Knight has said the casting followed the script rather than the other way round.
"The story determines the cast, and the story was set," Knight told The Hollywood Reporter in 2026.
Anderson's availability had been in question since he pleaded guilty in January 2024 to possessing crack cocaine, amphetamines, and two class C prescription drugs. Knight has not linked the two, and called Anderson a fantastic actor in the same interview.
Was the reveal well received?
Not universally. Killing off one of the show's two most popular characters off screen, and having the other one do it, was among the film's most-argued-about choices — with viewers pointing to the sequence as sitting oddly against the series' version of the brothers. Knight's argument is structural: Tommy needed to have done something he couldn't forgive himself for, or the redemption arc at the end has nothing to push against.
What about Tommy?
He dies too. Shot twice by Tim Roth's John Beckett during the counterfeiting plot, he holds his ground, kills Beckett, and dies in Duke's arms reciting "In the Bleak Midwinter". Kaulo passes his manuscript to Duke at the send-off, and the body is burned.
For the record: two further series are confirmed, set in 1953 and centred on Duke and the next generation. Both Shelby brothers who ran Small Heath are out of the story by then.