Charlie Heaton is set to play Charles Shelby in the untitled Peaky Blinders sequel series, a six-episode drama now in production in Birmingham that moves the story a decade past World War II.
The series will follow the next generation of Shelbys after Tommy Shelby bowed out in the recently released film spin-off The Immortal Man. The first image from the production shows Heaton in costume, underscoring that the show will put his Charles Shelby at the center of a postwar Birmingham rebuilding story.
The new installment is billed as a six-episode limited series. It will be set a decade after World War II and use the city’s recovery from the Blitz as part of its backdrop. Jamie Bell will co-star as Duke Shelby, Charles’s half-brother, who — according to the series synopsis — has not been seen by Charles in years.
According to the synopsis, Charles Shelby fought a violent war, much of it behind enemy lines, and is now trying to embrace normality after the conflict. It adds that Charles severed all ties to the Peaky Blinders gang and to the hedonistic Shelby lifestyle, positioning the series as a study of a man trying to leave a violent past behind as Birmingham itself is rebuilt.
Jessica Brown Findlay, Lashana Lynch and Lucy Karczewski are also joining the cast. The show is written by Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders, and is being produced by Banijay U.K. companies Kudos and Garrison Drama. In the U.K. the series will premiere on iPlayer and One; Netflix will carry it in the rest of the world. A release date has not yet been set.
Heaton is best known for his role as Jonathan Byers in Stranger Things, and his casting signals a clear generational shift in the Peaky Blinders narrative: the original-era story line that centered on Tommy Shelby has been closed out and the new series explicitly turns to the lives of the Shelby children and siblings after the war.
The tension at the heart of the premise is straightforward and dramatic. Charles has cut himself off from the gang and from the Shelby lifestyle, yet the arrival of Duke — a half-brother he has not seen in years — and the communal pressures of a city being rebuilt after the Blitz make it unlikely that he will remain entirely separate. The synopsis frames Charles’s attempts at normality against the stubborn legacy of family and violence.
The production’s location in Birmingham reinforces that contrast: the city’s wartime destruction and its postwar reconstruction are not just scenery but part of the story the series intends to tell. That setting links the personal work of a returning soldier trying to live differently with the broader social project of rebuilding after a cataclysmic conflict.
What happens next is plain from the way the series is being positioned. With Steven Knight returning as writer and the show launching on major platforms in the U.K. and internationally, the Peaky Blinders franchise is shifting from its original chronology to a contained, next-generation drama centered on Charles and the family strains that follow a brutal war. The question the premiere will answer is whether Charles Shelby can truly leave the Peaky past behind when his half-brother and the city he left behind demand his attention.
