Shelby Son: Every Tommy Shelby Son, Explained

Tommy Shelby fathered three children across six seasons of Peaky Blinders. Two survived. One (Duke) grew up in a Romani camp, knowing his father’s name but never his world. The other, Charlie, grew up sheltered inside the Shelby household, surrounded by violence he was too young to understand.

Shelby son family tree showing Duke Shelby Charlie Shelby and Karl Thorne with their mothers and roles in the Peaky Blinders dynasty

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When Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man hit Netflix on March 20, 2026, it put Duke front and centre. Barry Keoghan stepped into the role originated by Conrad Khan in Season 6, and the film became the most-watched title on Netflix during its first week, pulling 25.3 million views. The movie currently holds a 7.7 out of 10 on IMDb and a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Duke Shelby, Charles “Charlie” Shelby, Karl Thorne: each carries a different piece of the Shelby legacy. Here is every Shelby son, who played them, what happened to them in the film, and why Duke is the one Steven Knight chose to carry the franchise forward.

Who Is Duke Shelby? Tommy’s Secret Son Explained

Duke Shelby is Tommy Shelby’s illegitimate firstborn son, born Erasmus “Duke” Shelby (née Chiriklo). His mother was Zelda Chiriklo, a Romani woman Tommy met at the Appleby Horse Fair in May 1914. She stole his watch and chain before they became involved. Zelda raised Duke alone within a travelling community after Tommy left for World War I, and she died of an illness when Duke was still a child.

Duke grew up entirely outside the Shelby empire. No Birmingham. No Peaky Blinders. No inherited power. He knew who his father was but never met him until Season 6.

Duke’s Introduction in Season 6

Duke first appeared in Peaky Blinders Season 6, which aired on BBC One in February 2022. He arrives in Birmingham as a young man, roughly 17 or 18, not as a child looking for a home. Tommy has known about his existence for years but kept it from the rest of the family.

Their first meeting is cold. Tommy doesn’t embrace a long-lost son. He evaluates one. Duke walks in with the quiet self-possession of someone who has survived without a family name propping him up. Tommy watches to see whether Duke has the instincts to be useful, not whether he’s happy to be found.

Conrad Khan played Duke in the television series. Khan brought a coiled stillness to the role: watchful, physically capable, not easily impressed by the Shelby name. He appeared in only a handful of scenes, but each one carried weight. By the finale, Duke had proven both his loyalty and his willingness to act violently on Tommy’s behalf.

Duke’s Romani Heritage and Dual Identity

The Shelby family has Romani roots on their mother’s side. Tommy, Arthur, Ada all carry that heritage. But they grew up in Small Heath, Birmingham. Their Romani identity became something they referenced when convenient, not something they lived daily.

Duke is different. Zelda raised him fully within a Romani travelling community. His cultural identity is not a footnote. When he enters the Shelby orbit, he brings a set of values, instincts, and loyalties that don’t align neatly with a criminal empire run from a betting shop.

That tension between blood and belonging is what makes Duke the most compelling character introduced in the show’s final season. He is a Shelby by DNA and a Romani by upbringing, and those two identities do not share a comfortable border.

Tommy Shelby’s Sons: Duke, Charlie, and the Shelby Family Tree

Tommy Shelby has two surviving sons: Duke and Charles “Charlie” Shelby. A third child, Ruby Shelby (his daughter with Lizzie Stark), died as a young girl in Season 6, a loss that broke something in Tommy that the show never fully repaired.

Tommy Shelby Son Name: Charles “Charlie” Shelby

Charlie is Tommy’s legitimate son, named after Tommy’s uncle Charlie Strong. His mother was Grace Burgess, Tommy’s first great love, who was killed by an assassin’s bullet at a charity gala in Season 3. Charlie was a toddler when Grace died.

Charlie grew up inside the Shelby household, raised by nannies and later by Lizzie after she married Tommy. He is the legitimate heir, the son with the Shelby name on his birth certificate, the one Tommy built the empire to pass down to. But Charlie is also the son Tommy kept at emotional arm’s length, terrified of losing another person he loved.

By Season 6, Charlie was old enough to understand pieces of his father’s world but too young to participate in it. Where Duke was hardened by absence, Charlie risked being softened by proximity to power he didn’t earn. In The Immortal Man, an older Charlie makes a brief appearance near the end of the film, now a soldier fighting in North Africa during WWII, played by Alfie Thomas Bland (replacing Billy Jenkins and Jensen Clarke from earlier seasons).

Ada Shelby’s Son: Karl Thorne

Ada Shelby’s son, Karl Thorne, is named after Karl Marx, a choice that tells you everything about Ada’s politics and her late husband Freddie Thorne’s communist convictions. Freddie died of pestilence early in the series, leaving Ada to raise Karl alone.

Karl occupies a strange position in the Shelby world. He is a Shelby by blood (Ada is Tommy’s sister) but a Thorne by name. Ada spent years trying to keep him away from the family business. She moved to London, built her own career, and raised Karl with the explicit goal of breaking the cycle.

Whether she succeeded is an open question. By the later seasons, Ada herself was drawn deeper into Shelby operations than she ever intended.

Where Duke Fits Among Tommy’s Children

Duke is the son Tommy didn’t raise but ended up needing most. Charlie represents continuity, the safe, sanctioned future. Duke represents disruption, an heir with nothing to lose and instincts sharpened outside the family’s protection.

Duke Shelby’s Mother: Who Is Zelda Chiriklo?

Zelda Chiriklo was a Romani woman from Tommy’s past. They met at the Appleby Horse Fair in May 1914, a connection formed before any of the events of Peaky Blinders. She raised Duke alone within a Romani community and died when he was young.

Note: Some fan wikis and earlier articles incorrectly refer to Duke’s mother as “Zipora.” The official series and The Immortal Man film confirm her name is Zelda Chiriklo.

Zelda’s Identity and Tommy’s Hidden Past

The series reveals almost nothing about Zelda as an individual. She isn’t given screen time, dialogue, or a visible presence in the TV show. Her existence is communicated entirely through Duke and through Tommy’s acknowledgment that he fathered a child before the war.

What is clear is that Zelda shaped Duke’s identity completely. His Romani heritage, his self-sufficiency, his wariness around the Shelby world, all of that comes from her.

In The Immortal Man, Rebecca Ferguson plays Kaulo, Zelda’s identical twin sister, who appears as a mysterious Romani medium. Through Kaulo, the film fills in pieces of Tommy and Zelda’s relationship that the series left blank, adding a supernatural edge to the family mythology.

The Romani Connection: Esme Lee and the Pattern

Peaky Blinders has a recurring pattern with its Romani women. They enter the Shelby world through relationships with Shelby men, raise children who straddle two cultures, and get burned by the family’s violence.

Esme Lee married John Shelby in Season 1 as part of a truce between the Shelby and Lee families. She bore John’s children, tried to keep them safe, and walked away from the family entirely after John was murdered in Season 4. Esme made the same calculation Zelda made years earlier: the Shelby name is not worth the danger it attracts.

Both Zelda and Esme made the same calculation: distance from the Shelbys is the only real protection. Zelda’s children disappeared with her. Duke came back.

Who Plays Tommy Shelby’s Son? Barry Keoghan as Duke

Barry Keoghan plays Duke Shelby in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. The casting was one of the film’s earliest attention-grabbers, partly because of Keoghan’s profile after The Banshees of Inisherin and Saltburn, partly because it confirmed Duke as the central figure rather than a supporting character.

“The idea of the Shelbys being the Forrest Gump of England delights me. I hope it never ends.”
— r/television, March 2026 (479 upvotes)

How Keoghan Landed the Role

Cillian Murphy personally asked Keoghan to take the part. In interviews, Murphy has shared the anecdote of approaching Keoghan directly, a move that speaks to how much creative control Murphy had over the film’s direction. Steven Knight, the show’s creator, had described the film as needing to feel genuinely cinematic, and attaching Keoghan signalled that ambition.

Keoghan’s Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), his lead role in Saltburn (2023), and his turn as the Joker in The Batman (2022) had established him as one of the most in-demand young actors working. The film was directed by Tom Harper and written by Knight, with a runtime of 112 minutes.

What Keoghan Has Said About the Role

In a Variety interview, Keoghan said he wouldn’t want to attempt continuing the franchise: “It’s a lot to follow Tommy Shelby… Duke is a different sort of Shelby.” In a separate interview with RTE, he described Duke’s core motivation: “At the end of the day, there’s an animalistic thing of the cub looking for its dad.”

Rather than studying Tommy Shelby obsessively, Keoghan built Duke as his own character, approaching him through his Romani heritage and his mother’s influence rather than the Shelby name. That instinct tracks with Duke’s arc. He isn’t Tommy’s shadow. He’s a parallel line that finally intersected.

The Accent Debate

Not everyone is convinced by the performance. Keoghan’s attempt at a Birmingham accent has drawn criticism from portions of the fanbase. One viewer on X/Twitter called it “absolutely Terrible Accent no presence at all,” while a Letterboxd review described the performance as “largely limp and lifeless, matching the endlessly drab, grey, and dull presentation.”

“Plenty of time for Barry Keoghan to work on his accent.”
— r/television, March 2026

The comment is wry, but it captures a genuine split. Supporters argue that Keoghan’s screen presence (that mix of vulnerability and danger he perfected in Saltburn and The Killing of a Sacred Deer) is exactly what Duke needs. Critics say an Irish actor doing a Romani-Birmingham hybrid accent was always going to be a stretch, and the film doesn’t give him enough room to sell it.

What Happened to Tommy Shelby’s Son in the Peaky Blinders Film

In The Immortal Man, set roughly 10 to 12 years after Season 6, Duke is no longer the uncertain outsider who arrived in Birmingham. He is running the Peaky Blinders, but running them recklessly. Tommy, meanwhile, has pulled back from operations, and the father-son dynamic drives the film’s central conflict.

Warning: spoilers for Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man follow.

What the Film Reveals

The film’s stakes are personal, not political. Duke wants Tommy to be his father. Tommy needs Duke to be his successor. Those aren’t the same thing, and the gap between them is where the story lives.

By the film’s end, Tommy Shelby is dead. The character who survived six seasons, a world war, multiple assassination attempts, and his own cancer diagnosis finally reaches a conclusion that Knight described as being “about consequences.” Duke, now the new Rom Baro, leads the Peaky Blinders in conducting a Gypsy funeral for Tommy.

Kaulo (Zelda’s twin, played by Rebecca Ferguson) recovers Tommy’s manuscript, titled The Immortal Man, in which Tommy reflects on his life. Despite his wealth and power, what mattered was having his family by his side.

Duke as Tommy’s Heir: Legacy and Succession

Tommy spent six seasons building, destroying, and rebuilding his power. Charlie was the legitimate heir, but Charlie is young, sheltered, and serving in North Africa during WWII. Duke was the practical choice: old enough, tough enough, and unburdened by the sentimentality that makes Charlie vulnerable.

But inheritance in the Shelby world is never clean.

“Why Duke could never be Tommy Shelby”
— r/PeakyBlinders, March 2026

That Reddit thread title captures what many fans feel. Tommy Shelby was shaped by the trenches of WWI, by grief, by a specific kind of cunning born from decades of navigating class warfare in 1920s England. Duke didn’t live any of that. Handing him the keys to the Shelby empire is a gamble, the kind Tommy himself would have appreciated, but one that plenty of fans think won’t pay off.

The Sequel Series: Duke Shelby’s Next Chapter

Steven Knight confirmed in March 2026 that a Peaky Blinders sequel series has been greenlit: two seasons of six episodes each, produced for Netflix and BBC. Knight told Deadline that “the son character will feature in what goes forward,” confirming Duke as a central figure in the new series.

Whether Keoghan himself returns is less certain. The sequel series is expected to involve a decade-plus time jump from the events of The Immortal Man, which would age Duke into his 40s or 50s. Knight has been deliberately vague about casting: when asked directly if Keoghan would return, he responded, “I can’t comment.”

How the Film Was Received

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man premiered at Symphony Hall in Birmingham on March 2, 2026, followed by a limited theatrical release on March 6 and global streaming on Netflix starting March 20. It became the platform’s most-watched title in its first week.

Critical reception has been largely positive. The Hollywood Reporter called it a “frothy sequel film,” while the New York Times praised Murphy’s portrayal of Tommy as “more myth than man.” The film holds a 92% critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.7 out of 10 on IMDb.

The pacing drew the most consistent criticism. Multiple reviewers noted that the plot felt condensed compared to the series, and fans on r/PeakyBlinders echoed the sentiment.

“This shouldve been another Season”
— r/PeakyBlinders, March 2026 (15 upvotes)

That complaint keeps surfacing. Six seasons built a world dense enough to sustain 36 hours of television. Condensing the next chapter into 112 minutes meant sacrificing the slow-burn pacing that made the series distinctive. Whether that trade-off works depends on whether you came for the world or for the story. The film delivers the latter at the expense of the former.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Shelby Sons

Who is Tommy Shelby’s son in Peaky Blinders?

Tommy has two sons. Charles “Charlie” Shelby is his legitimate son with Grace Burgess, introduced in Season 2. Duke Shelby (born Erasmus Shelby, née Chiriklo) is his illegitimate son with a Romani woman named Zelda Chiriklo, introduced in Season 6. Both are alive at the end of the series. Duke plays the central role in the 2026 film The Immortal Man.

What is Tommy Shelby’s son’s name?

Tommy’s legitimate son is Charles Shelby, called Charlie, named after Tommy’s uncle Charlie Strong. His illegitimate son is Erasmus “Duke” Shelby. Duke is the primary Shelby son in The Immortal Man and the confirmed lead of the upcoming sequel series.

Who plays Tommy Shelby’s son in the Peaky Blinders movie?

Barry Keoghan plays Duke Shelby in the film. In the TV series (Season 6), Duke was played by Conrad Khan. Keoghan was personally recruited by Cillian Murphy for the role. Charlie appears briefly near the end of the film, played by Alfie Thomas Bland.

What happened to Tommy Shelby’s son Duke?

In The Immortal Man, Duke runs the Peaky Blinders but struggles with recklessness and his complicated relationship with Tommy. By the film’s end, after Tommy’s death, Duke becomes the new Rom Baro and leads the Gypsy funeral for his father. Steven Knight has confirmed Duke will return in the greenlit sequel series.

Who is Ada Shelby’s son?

Ada Shelby’s son is Karl Thorne, named after Karl Marx. His father was Freddie Thorne, a communist organiser who died early in the series. Karl was raised by Ada in London, kept away from the Shelby family business.

Is Duke Shelby Tommy’s biological son?

Yes. Duke is Tommy Shelby’s biological firstborn son, conceived before WWI during Tommy’s relationship with Zelda Chiriklo at the Appleby Horse Fair in 1914. Tommy acknowledged Duke’s existence in Season 6 and brought him into the Shelby fold.

Who is Duke Shelby’s mother?

Duke’s mother is Zelda Chiriklo, a Romani woman who met Tommy at the Appleby Horse Fair in May 1914. She raised Duke within a travelling community and died when he was a child. In the film, her twin sister Kaulo (played by Rebecca Ferguson) becomes a key character. Note: some older sources incorrectly list Duke’s mother as “Zipora.” The official name is Zelda.

Will Barry Keoghan be in the Peaky Blinders sequel series?

Steven Knight confirmed that Duke will feature in the sequel series (two seasons, six episodes each, for Netflix and BBC). When asked specifically about Keoghan returning, Knight said “I can’t comment,” suggesting the role may be recast for an older version of Duke, given the expected time jump.

The Shelby Son Who Changes Everything

Peaky Blinders spent six seasons and one feature film building Tommy Shelby into a legend — and showing exactly what that legend cost. Duke Shelby inherits the fallout. He’s the son Tommy hid, the heir Tommy chose, and the character Steven Knight is betting the franchise’s future on.

The film gave him a proper introduction. The sequel series will determine whether he can hold the screen without Cillian Murphy standing beside him. Fans are split — some see the next generation of a great story, others see a franchise stretching past its natural end. Either way, the Shelby son nobody saw coming has become the one who decides what comes next.

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