Paul Greengrass has built much of his filmography around people put under pressure by apparatuses larger than themselves: institutions, chains of command, political interests, events that leave no room for an easy choice. With The Uprising, he brings this tension to 14th-century England, returning to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to recount the relationship between those subjected to power and those who decide they will no longer accept it.
The film, starring Andrew Garfield, does not, however, choose to make the uprising's best-known historical figures its direct protagonists. Greengrass places an invented character at the center of the story: a farmer simply called Ploughman, the peasant plowman. It is through his journey that the director observes a community reduced to precarity and pushed toward rebellion, turning the individual into an entry point into a collective conflict.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Greengrass explained that he began writing the project in March 2020, on the second day of the pandemic-imposed lockdown. The idea, he said, had stayed with him for years: an interest dating back to his school days, when he studied the Peasants’ Revolt in Great Britain. Over the following five years, while working on the screenplay, the director saw the story's themes gain even greater relevance.
A medieval revolt, without turning it into a history lesson
The 1381 uprising was set in an England marked by the aftermath of the Black Death. The increased tax burden enacted under Richard II and his council fueled a protest movement whose leaders included Wat Tyler and the preacher John Ball. The rebels marched on London and reached as far as the Tower, demanding fairer and more dignified living conditions.
The historical material is therefore precise, but The Uprising does not intend to be an ensemble chronicle of the figures who led the rebellion. Greengrass's choice is narrative before it is historiographical: giving a fictional face to the mass of people who often remain anonymous in historical records. Ploughman is conceived as an ordinary figure, not as a commander already consigned to public memory. Andrew Garfield portrays this transition from common man to symbol, a journey in which heroism does not arise from an investiture, but from the collision with injustice.
It is a line consistent with the British director's filmography. In Bloody Sunday, United 93, and Captain Phillips, Greengrass has chronicled individuals trapped in situations where personal agency collides with political and social forces beyond their control. Even Jason Bourne, while anything but an ordinary man, subverted the very mechanism that created him and sought to break free from a clandestine system. In the new film, that dynamic is stripped of intelligence agencies, technology, and contemporary settings to return to its most elemental form: a peasant confronting an order deemed immutable.
The discarded title and the shadow of Robin Hood
The most compelling key to the project lies in its original working title: The Hood. Greengrass later opted for The Uprising, but that initial working title underscores the connection the film establishes with Robin Hood. Indeed, the protagonist's arc progressively brings him closer to the archetype of the outlaw hero: someone who steps outside the law because the existing law is rigged in favor of the ruling class.
The reference is not merely iconographic. The name Ploughman evokes Piers Plowman, the poem by William Langland written in the 1370s. The work predates the revolt and features the earliest known literary reference to Robin Hood. The legend, which had already been circulating in embryonic forms since the 13th century, would later achieve wider distribution through tales committed to writing between the 15th and 16th centuries.
Greengrass suggests a link between the Great Rising and the popular rise of those stories. Following the defeat of the insurrection, the director argues, the outlaw capable of standing up to the powerful offered a form of imaginary redemption to those who found themselves stripped of representation and political agency. This is not about assigning Robin Hood a direct historical origin, nor portraying him as the embodiment of a single rebel from 1381. Rather, the film uses that historical ground to examine how societies process their defeats and translate a demand for justice into popular narrative.
This approach sets The Uprising apart from the recurring cinematic formula of Robin Hood, often focused on the spectacle of the archer, duels, and period adventure. Here, the origins of the myth are sought in the material conditions of those who work the land, pay taxes, and have no voice in the decisions that govern their lives. The eventual emergence of an outlaw is therefore not an excuse to modernize a legend, but the outcome of a social context.
A story of power that speaks to the present
Its genesis during the first lockdown does not automatically turn the film into an allegory of the pandemic. Greengrass does not present the revolt of 1381 as a direct commentary on recent years. However, the lengthy production coincided with a period in which inequality, the cost of living, political representation, and conflict between citizens and institutions have returned to the center of debate in many countries. This is the sense of relevance evoked by the director: not a forced overlap between eras, but the persistence of questions that historical cinema can address without disguising itself as contemporary reporting.
For the audiovisual industry, a project like The Uprising also signals the value of a less conventional reinterpretation of highly recognizable cultural properties. Robin Hood is a name audiences immediately associate with cinema, but Greengrass does not start with yet another version of the canonical character. He starts from the historical and literary conditions that fueled its enduring appeal. In this way, the reference to the myth functions as an interpretive lens rather than a brand to be exploited on the surface.
It remains to be seen how audiences will receive a film that combines historical drama, a tale of uprising, and the genealogy of a popular legend. Casting Garfield provides the project with an actor capable of balancing fragility and determination, but the weight of the work rests primarily on Greengrass’s vision: making a medieval rebellion visceral and believable, without reducing it to a mere backdrop for an individual hero.
The Uprising seems to stem from this very tension. The story follows one man, but does not pretend that one man is enough to explain a revolt. Instead, it seeks the moment when a disenfranchised multitude finds, in the story of someone defying the established order, a language to name what has been denied to it. It is also from there, according to Greengrass, that Robin Hood continues to speak to the present.
