Cillian Murphy has spent years bringing Tommy Shelby to life as a man who can stare down almost anyone without flinching. Across the long run of Peaky Blinders, audiences have watched Tommy face enemies who were brutal, loud, unpredictable, and power-hungry. That is why Murphy’s latest description of working opposite Tim Roth feels so striking. According to him, Roth did not try to dominate a scene through shouting or theatrical aggression. Instead, he used something much more unsettling: silence.
Murphy says Roth introduced a kind of fear that felt entirely different from anything he had encountered before on screen. A veteran actor with more than 30 years in Hollywood, Roth reportedly arrived in a tightly guarded role and immediately created an atmosphere that was impossible to ignore. Rather than attacking a scene with force, he stripped everything back. He spoke in a low, raspy whisper, barely above a murmur, and allowed long, deeply uncomfortable pauses to hang in the air. That restraint, Murphy suggests, made the performance all the more terrifying.
What makes the story so effective is the specific image Murphy recalls from one of their key confrontations. In the middle of delivering a line, Roth suddenly stopped speaking. He did not rush to fill the gap or signal where the moment was going. He simply fixed Murphy with what was described as a dead, shark-like grin and kept staring. The pause stretched on long enough to break the natural rhythm of the scene. For an actor as experienced and controlled as Murphy, that disruption clearly had a powerful effect. He admitted that the tactic completely threw him off balance.
That detail reveals why Roth’s approach may become one of the most memorable elements of the film. Great screen villains do not always rely on explosive outbursts or dramatic speeches. Sometimes the most frightening presence is the one that remains calm, unreadable, and almost eerily still. Silence forces everyone else in the scene to react. It creates uncertainty. It makes viewers lean in, waiting for something to happen, and that anticipation can be far more disturbing than violence or rage. Roth appears to understand that instinctively.
For Murphy, who has carried the psychological weight of Tommy Shelby for years, being unsettled in that way is no small thing. His reaction suggests that this new antagonist will not simply be another obstacle in Tommy’s path, but a figure capable of shifting the emotional temperature of the story. If Roth’s performance truly depends on whisper-level menace and long, suffocating pauses, then the film’s climax may feel less like a conventional showdown and more like a slow, nerve-shredding battle of control.
In that sense, the most chilling part of Murphy’s account is not what Roth said, but what he chose not to say. Silence became a weapon. A stare became a threat. And if Murphy himself was rattled by it, audiences may be about to meet one of the most deeply unnerving enemies the franchise has ever produced.