Only four episodes in, the sixth and final season of Peaky Blinders has already been one hell of an emotional rollercoaster for fans, and it seems that the producers are only going to get more ambitious from here on out. In a new interview, director Anthony Byrne has revealed that the series finale will be a feature-length episode.
The filmmaker recently had a chat with RadioTimes to celebrate his work on the hit gangster show, and let slip that the forthcoming final episode will go on for a whopping 81 minutes, as opposed to the usual one-hour runtime. Showrunner Steven Knight had already teased that a sequel film was in development, and apparently, this feature-length series finale served as something of a “dry run” for that ambitious cinematic undertaking.
“We were like f**k the 10 o’clock news. It’s such a Peaky thing to do for the last hurrah,” Byrne said of the last episode. “It’s the 10:22 news for one night only. It feels very, very different to the rest of the season. It feels very, very different to anything we’ve done before. It’s very epic in scope. It feels like a film — it’s a kind of dry run for the feature film.”
With how things have been building towards that monumental conclusion, fans actually wouldn’t mind a few extra minutes for the sake of breathing room, if nothing else. This is, after all, one last outing for these Brummie ruffians we’ve come to know and love, so none of us would actually mind if the series finale just kept going.
Peaky Blinders will return on March 27 with its penultimate episode, titled “The Road to Hell.”