Name: The Uprising
Director: Paul Greengrass
Genre: Drama, History, War
Released: 2026-09-10T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 128 min
Cast: Andrew Garfield, Jamie Bell, Cosmo Jarvis, Woody Norman, Tom Hollander

A kingdom emptied by war and plague. A tax the poor cannot meet. A ploughman who decides the arrangement is over. The Uprising builds its story from the ground up, in the mud of the field rather than the stone of the throne, and follows a laborer as he becomes the axis of a revolt against the crown of England.

Paul Greengrass returns to the register he made his own: the handheld camera that treats history as weather, close and unstable, always inside the crowd rather than above it. Here he turns that method on the medieval world. The first images trade the burnished armor of the costume epic for wet wool, woodsmoke and the ragged geometry of a peasant army massing on open ground. Nothing gleams. The frame stays down at eye level, where the fighting is.

Andrew Garfield anchors the film as the ploughman, not a king and not a general but a man from the soil. It reads as a deliberate casting signal. Garfield’s gift is transparency, a face that registers thought before speech, and Greengrass points it downward, at labor and grief rather than heroics. The revolt gathers around him. The film asks whether an ordinary man can hold the center of a historical storm without hardening into a monument, and whether a face that famous can disappear far enough into a fourteenth-century field to make the question land.

Greengrass has spent his procedural cycle turning real events into pressure systems: a hijacking, a hostage crisis, a massacre and its long aftermath. He works in the present tense even when the material is the past, refusing the tidy hindsight of the period drama. The Uprising extends that instinct backward by centuries, applying the vocabulary of the modern thriller to the first great English rebellion, and betting that the distance in time changes nothing about how fear and hunger move through a crowd.

The rebellion it dramatizes is documented. In the summer that followed years of plague, a poll tax pushed the commons of England past endurance, and an army of laborers marched on London. Jamie Bell plays John Ball, the hedge-priest whose sermons gave the rising its language. Cosmo Jarvis is Wat Tyler, the leader who met the boy-king face to face and did not survive the meeting. Around them Greengrass arranges the machinery of power: Woody Norman as the teenage Richard II, Tom Hollander as the treasurer the mob would come to hate, Katherine Waterston as Joan of Kent inside a court watching the roads fill with the poor.

What the film has not yet shown is how it reconciles its invented center with the record. Its protagonist is a composite, a ploughman with no name in the chronicles, placed ahead of Ball and Tyler, the men history actually remembers. That is a choice with risk. The revolt ended in betrayal and slaughter, its promises revoked within days of being made. A drama built around a single hero can flatten a story whose real subject is how quickly power takes back what it concedes. Whether Greengrass lets that defeat stand, or rounds it into uplift, is the question the trailer leaves open.

The surface is doing careful work. Shot across Upper Bavaria and Franconia, at Nuremberg, the fortress at Lichtenau and the open-air museum at Bad Windsheim, the production stood inside stone that predates the story it tells and filled it with thousands of extras rather than digital crowds. Costume reads as class before it reads as character: undyed wool and cracked leather for the field, weighted cloth and cold metal for the court. The palette is mud, ash and iron, the color drained out of the world by hardship. Even the light looks rationed.

Sound is the other argument. Greengrass builds tension through rhythm — the scrape of tools becoming weapons, the low churn of a crowd before it turns, the abrupt silences that follow violence. A film about the voiceless tends to live or die on what it does with noise, and the early footage suggests a soundtrack of labor and breath rather than swelling strings. Surface, here, is not decoration. It is the thesis.

Andrew Garfield in the Paul Greengrass film The Uprising 2026 — Andrew Garfield in *The Uprising* (2026)

Alongside Garfield, Bell, Jarvis, Norman and Hollander, the cast includes Waterston, with Stephen Dillane, Thomasin McKenzie and Jonny Lee Miller in support. Greengrass directs from his own screenplay and produces with Jason Blum. The Uprising is a Blumhouse and Atomic Monster production with FilmNation Entertainment, running 128 minutes.

The film opens in the United States through Focus Features on September 10, with a United Kingdom release from Entertainment Film Distributors to follow on October 9. Germany and Russia share the American date; the rest of the territories arrive through the autumn, a slow rollout for a story about how fast a crowd can change everything, and how fast the powerful can change it back.