The Uprising is a large‑scale historical epic and a pointed reflection on class struggle, state violence, and the cyclical nature of rebellion. Greengrass’s approach refuses mythic simplicity; instead, he presents the revolt as a volatile collision of desperation, ideology, and human frailty.
“The Uprising,” written and directed by Greengrass himself, centres on the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, one of England’s most significant uprisings, sparked by economic hardship, political unrest, and heavy taxation. Andrew Garfield stars as the rebellion leader.
It’s Greengrass’s most ambitious historical action‑drama, a blend of muscular realism, political urgency, and human‑centred storytelling.
The film dramatises the uprising that helped inspire the later legend of Robin Hood, reframing the revolt not as distant medieval history but as a raw, combustible struggle for dignity and survival. At its centre is Andrew Garfield, playing the unnamed ploughman who becomes the reluctant leader of a rebellion against the tyranny of King Richard II. Garfield’s performance is shaped around Greengrass’s preference for behaviour‑driven tension: a man pushed from quiet labour into violent resistance, forced to navigate the moral cost of leading ordinary people into extraordinary danger.
The ensemble cast deepens the film’s political and emotional texture. Jamie Bell appears as the radical priest John Ball, whose sermons ignite the ideological spark of the revolt, while Cosmo Jarvis plays Wat Tyler, the charismatic figure historically associated with the uprising’s most explosive moments. Tom Hollander embodies Sir Robert Hales, the king’s treasurer and one of the revolt’s primary targets, and Woody Norman portrays the young Richard II, a boy‑king caught between fear, manipulation, and the crushing weight of inherited power. Thomasin McKenzie, Stephen Dillane, Jonny Lee Miller, and Katherine Waterston round out a cast designed to show the revolt from multiple vantage points — the oppressed, the opportunistic, the idealistic, and the terrified.
Greengrass stages the narrative with the same kinetic urgency that defined United 93 and Captain Phillips, but here the scale is medieval: burning villages, mass gatherings, and the claustrophobic brutality of hand‑to‑hand combat. Shot partly at Penzing Studios in Bavaria, the film uses natural landscapes and historically grounded production design to evoke a Britain on the brink — a country where famine, taxation, and political corruption have pushed the lower classes past the point of endurance. The cinematography by Pål Ulvik Rokseth and editing by William Goldenberg (as listed in production notes) support Greengrass’s immersive style, favouring immediacy over romanticism.
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