“There is God, and then there are Peaky Blinders,” notorious gang leader Tommy Shelby once informed a group of corrupt nuns. 

Within the gritty streets of Birmingham in the 1900s, that’s not entirely hyperbole. Peaky Blinders, a ruthless crime organization, runs the industrial city with an iron fist, taking on the police and rival gangs, while orchestrating several illegal money-making operations. 

Behind the fearsome group is Tommy, the second-oldest Shelby brother, who oversees all business dealings. Born to an Irish Romani family, Tommy — alongside his two brothers — fought in World War I, and each returned home with their fair share of buried trauma. As he trades the battlefields for racketeering, Tommy finds himself up against violent opposition, family rifts, deeply corrupt government officials, and ugly double-crossing. 

Now that Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is streaming on Netflix, let’s get to know the man behind (beneath?) the cap, from his most memorable moments to his significant character arcs. And yes, that’s an official order. 

Top Ten Tommy Shelby Moments of All Time

Vital Stats 

Name: Thomas Shelby 

Nickname: Tommy

Played by: Cillian Murphy 

Job: Leader of the Peaky Blinders, former sergeant major, and member of parliament 

Favorite watering hole: The Garrison 

Marital status: Widowed

First appearance: Season 1, Episode 1 (0:44)

Key Relationships 

Spouse: Grace (deceased), Lizzie (separated) 

Family: Arthur, John, Ada, Finn, Polly and Michael

Children: Duke, Charles, and Ruby

Sidekick: Several majestic horses, including Grace’s Secret, Monaghan Boy, and Quattro

Season 1 

• Tommy, Arthur (Paul Anderson), and Aunt Polly (Helen McCrory) have a problem: the Peaky Blinders have stolen a shipment of guns that are of key importance to Winston Churchill (Andy Nyman). 
• Despite Aunt Polly’s discouragement, Tommy decides to hold the guns as leverage against the British government. 
• Churchill sends Chief Inspector Chester Campbell (Sam Neill) to Birmingham to track down the guns. The tough-as-nails copper has his own weapon — Grace (Annabelle Wallis), a secret agent who goes undercover as a barmaid to infiltrate the Peaky Blinders.
• Tommy is intrigued by Grace, and they flirt, which turns into something much more. “That’s the first time, since he came back from the war, that he genuinely falls in love and doesn’t have an agenda,” Murphy tells Netflix. “Of course, he finds out that she has an agenda.” 
• Grace can’t stomach double-crossing Tommy, so she resigns from her position and, in an effort to pacify Campbell, tells the copper where the guns are. 
• Campbell, it turns out, is in love with Grace and proposes marriage. Unfortunately for the chief, she’s just not that into him. 
• Meanwhile, trouble is brewing between the Peaky Blinders and their rival street gang, the Birmingham Boys, led by William “Billy” Kimber (Charlie Creed-Miles). 
• The Birmingham Boys oversee racetrack betting, which Tommy has a proclivity for fixing. 
• When the two gangs get into a brawl outside The Garrison, Billy fatally shoots Danny Whizz-Bang (Samuel Edward-Cook), a close friend of Tommy’s. The Peaky Blinders leader shoots his nemesis in the head.  
• The good news: Tommy has officially landed the biggest chunk of the betting market now that Billy is out of the picture. 
• The bad news: Grace flees to the United States after shooting Major Campbell on a train platform. He pulled the gun first, after learning about her allegiance to Tommy.

Season 2 

• It’s been two years since we last saw the Peaky crew, and in that time the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty put an end to Ireland’s War of Independence.
• The treaty creates a split within the IRA, and Tommy finds himself smack-dab in the middle of that rift.
• He carries out a hit on behalf of the anti-treaty faction, which leads Campbell — who survived Grace’s shooting — to blackmail the Peaky Blinders leader into working for the Crown in an undercover operation. 
• Tommy’s gang is also expanding operations past Birmingham and into London, where they plan to illegally ship liquor to prohibition-era America. 
• This puts them at odds with rival gang leaders Alfie Solomons (Tom Hardy) and Darby Sabini (Noah Taylor), who are also in the liquor smuggling business. Both men set out to squash a Peaky Blinders takeover, killing multiple of their men and getting Arthur arrested. 
• On top of all that, Grace is back, and the pair shares a sexy reunion. It’s been a pretty sultry season for Tommy overall … he also becomes romantically entangled with May Carleton (Charlotte Riley), a widow who helps him train his new horse. 
• Tommy forges an unexpected alliance with Alfie, who helps get Arthur out of prison, and the pair work together to bring down Sabini. 
• As for Grace? We find out that, following that tryst, Tommy is going to be a father. 

Robert Viglasky/Netflix

Season 3 

• We pick back up with Tommy and Grace as a married couple. The two tie the knot in a romantic ceremony, and Tommy is forced to inform his prone-to-violence family that there will be “no fucking fighting” at the wedding. 
• Before shooting that scene, Murphy recalls series creator Steven Knight informing him: “This is the most angry we’ve ever seen Tommy Shelby.”
• Grace and Tommy are the newly minted parents to their young son, Charles. 
• Tommy has a new enemy in the form of the Changrettas, an Italian crime family, and the Peaky Blinders decide to burn down a restaurant that belongs to Angel Changretta (Pedro Caxade), one of the mobsters. For good measure, they also violently attack Angel. 
• In retaliation, Angel’s father, Vicente (Kenneth Colley), hires a man to shoot Tommy — but the bullet misses and kills Grace. 
• Charles is kidnapped by Father Hughes (Paddy Considine), who demands that Tommy blow up a Soviet train in order to fracture relations between the United Kingdom and USSR.
• Michael (Finn Cole), Polly’s son, successfully extracts Charles from Father Hughes, and murders the priest, who once sexually abused him. 
• All this news doesn’t reach Tommy fast enough, so he blows up the train, which results in his entire family being carted off to prison. 
• Now, Tommy is the only Peaky Blinder not incarcerated, and he’s left figuring out how to free his family from jail. 

Robert Viglasky/Netflix

Season 4 

• Aunt Polly, Arthur, Michael, and John (Joe Cole) are all set to be executed for Tommy’s crime. 
• The Peaky Blinders leader manages to get them off the hook at the very last second by blackmailing King George V. Tommy also asks the ruler for his very own OBE, just for the hell of it. 
• They’re not out of the woods yet — Luca Changretta (Adrien Brody), Angel’s brother and head of the New York mafia, vows to avenge his sibling’s death. He murders John and shoots Michael. 
• Through some sneaky maneuvering, Tommy publicly declares that Arthur is dead, claiming that he was murdered at the hands of Luca’s men. He offers to end the feud between the Changrettas and the Peaky Blinders, promising to sign over all of his family’s business and assets to their rivals. 
• When Luca arrives to collect what’s promised to him, he’s shot and killed by a very-much-alive Arthur. 
• With the Changrettas under control, Tommy turns his attention to loftier ambitions. Namely, providing insider information about communists in exchange for a high-profile government position. That’s right: Tommy Shelby is heading to parliament. 
• Though Tommy is still grieving the death of Grace, he strikes up a romance with Lizzie Stark (Natasha O’Keeffe), a former sex worker who heads up his office. The pair consummate their relationship on a canal, which results in Lizzie getting pregnant with their daughter Ruby (Heaven-Leigh Clee). 

Season 5 

• Over in America, there’s a major stock market crash, and Michael, who is heading the Peaky Blinders’ affairs in the states, loses the Shelbys’ fortune. 
• Michael, alongside his fiancée, Gina (Anya Taylor-Joy), returns to London. Tommy finds himself haunted by dreams of a black cat coming for his crown, and suspects Michael might be the culprit. 
• As a member of parliament, Tommy joins forces with Oswald Mosley (Sam Claflin), who would go on to found the British Union of Fascists. 
• Tommy isn’t interested in fascism — rather, he’s aiming to take down Oswald from the inside. “Perhaps at last, Tommy Shelby has actually started to believe in something,” Ada says. 
• The Peaky leader arranges for Oswald, who is rapidly becoming more and more powerful, to be assassinated during one of his rallies. 
• Unbeknownst to Tommy, Peaky Blinders’ member Billy Grade (Emmett J. Scanlan) has been loose-lipped about his assassination plan. Tommy’s hit man is murdered before he can carry out the job. 
• This is the tip of the iceberg for Tommy, who has been plagued by dreams of Grace asking him to join her in death.  
• Distraught by the failed assassination and triggered by Grace’s spirit, Tommy contemplates suicide and holds a gun to his head as the season comes to a close. 

Season 6 

• Though Tommy decides not to take his own life, he’s quickly met with another heavy dose of trauma. 
• It turns out the IRA was responsible for undercutting Tommy’s assassination plans against Mosley, and they decide to deal another blow to the Peaky family. “Ever since you began to build your empire, you’ve had a crutch to lean on. Last night we kicked away that crutch,” Laura McKee (Charlene McKenna), the captain of the IRA, tells Tommy. His Aunt Polly has been murdered. (In real life, the show’s beloved star Helen McCrory died of cancer.)
• Michael, believing Tommy is to blame for his mother’s death, vows to seek revenge on him. He attempts to bomb the gang leader’s car, but Tommy is one step ahead of him, and shoots Michael. “Polly was half of me,” he tells Michael. “She still visits me in my dreams. She’ll visit me no more.”
• Looking back on that moment, Murphy tells Netflix, “We were all bereft making that season because of the loss of Helen. She was very, very present during that shoot, and Steve wrote her to be really, really present as a character in the episodes. I think that whole series was a tribute to Helen.”
• Tommy sleeps with Lady Milton, Mosley’s fiancée, and Lizzie gets wind of his affair. She decides to leave Tommy, and takes Charles with her. 
• Ruby gets sick with tuberculosis and dies. Dr. Holford (Aneurin Barnard), Tommy’s physician, informs him that he has a tumor — potentially as a result of his exposure to Ruby — and only has a short amount of time to live.
• At Ruby’s funeral, Tommy discovers that he has a son named Duke (Conrad Khan), whom he conceived with his Romani lover Zelda, before WWI. 
• Zelda raised Duke on her own until her death, and he turned to thievery to get by. Once Tommy meets his son, he enfolds him into the Peaky Blinders. 
• As Tommy faces down the prospect of his impending death, he decides to commit suicide — only to be visited by the vision of Ruby. “It was a really beautiful scene because you get to see that more kind of gentle, emotional side of him,” Murphy tells Netflix.
• Ruby informs her father that he’s not sick. She encourages Tommy to “light a fire,” which he does, picking up a piece of newspaper to use as kindling. 
• He sees a photo of Dr. Holford at Mosley’s wedding, and deduces that he had been given a fake diagnosis. 
• Tommy travels to seek revenge on Dr. Holford and is about to murder him when a bell rings out. “He didn’t kill the doctor, which is unusual for Tommy,” Murphy notes. “He just let him go because the clock chimed, and it was armistice hour.”
• We last see Tommy riding his horse into the distance, with questions swirling about what’s next for our favorite antihero. 

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