The full truth comes when Tommy visits Ada’s corpse after her assassination, finally confessing that Arthur’s death had been no accident. In a fit of rage, he admits he deliberately strangled his brother, desperate at the time to be free of the burden Arthur had become. “I killed [my] own brother, because I wanted to be free of him,” he admits.
We see the incident play out in a flashback, though Arthur’s face remains obscured, making Tommy’s haunting from the death more understandable.
Arthur does make one final — very brief — appearance in the climactic scenes. As Tommy climbs a narrow tunnel, he experiences a series of PTSD-style flashbacks from his time in the First World War and other traumatic moments. Among them is a fleeting image of his elder brother, sitting on rubble, a haunting reminder of the life Tommy lost.
What has actor Paul Anderson said about it?
Given that he likely expected to appear in the film — his character was alive and well when we last saw him — the death of Arthur Shelby probably came as a shock to Anderson.
Anderson addressed Arthur’s absence in an interview with LADbible earlier in March, telling the publication that he was at peace with the decision not to include his character.
“Well, what can you do, eh?” he said. “It is how it is. I thought I’d just leave them to it. I think it’s great.”
He admitted that he had been slightly “apprehensive” about the idea of making a film, explaining, “I thought we should’ve just done a couple more seasons, and I didn’t see a reason to do a film, to be honest.”
However, Anderson added that he was happy with the way his character was written out of the story.
“I think it’s great,” he explained. “I mean, it’s such a powerful thing to do. It’s something you don’t see on TV. Everyone thought, well, everyone knows Arthur’s gonna die. I was quite surprised, I [Arthur] was quite nasty sometimes, I weren’t very nice to people in it. But people loved me.”
In 2024, Anderson pleaded guilty to possessing Class A crack cocaine, Class B amphetamines, and two Class C prescription substances, after being caught with the drugs in London on 26 December 2023. He was fined £1,345.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is available to stream on Netflix.