The Uprising Movie 2026: Andrew Garfield, Paul Greengrass, and the True Story of the 1381 Peasants Revolt

The historical epic has been looking for a fresh angle for years, and Paul Greengrass may have found one in a place Hollywood usually treats as dusty textbook material. His new medieval drama, The Uprising, puts Andrew Garfield at the center of one of the most violent popular rebellions in British history: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Greengrass, the Academy Award-nominated director behind United 93, Captain Phillips, and the Bourne franchise, is approaching the period with the kind of raw, close-range filmmaking that has become his trademark.

That alone would make The Uprising an interesting project. Then the marketing changed. Just weeks before the planned US theatrical release, Focus Features began presenting the movie under the striking subtitle The Rise of Robin Hood. Suddenly, a film that had been sold as a harsh historical drama about class warfare looked like it might also be an origin story for one of the most recognizable legends in English folklore.

And that is where things get complicated. Is The Uprising actually trying to recreate the events of 1381 as faithfully as possible, or is the Robin Hood connection about to reshape the entire story? The answer seems to sit somewhere between history and legend, which may either make the film far more interesting or create exactly the kind of compromise that longtime history fans tend to hate.

The Uprising Movie Review: What Rotten Tomatoes, Forums, and Trailers Tell Us About Andrew Garfield’s Medieval Epic

The Story: From a Grieving Ploughman to the Face of a Rebellion

The film takes place in 1381, when England is already exhausted by years of crisis. The Black Death has devastated the population, the country is still spending heavily on the Hundred Years War with France, and ordinary people are trapped inside a rigid feudal system that gives them very little control over their own lives. Then comes another burden: the monarchy of the young King Richard II imposes a harsh poll tax on commoners across the country.

For people already struggling to survive, this is the point where patience runs out.

Andrew Garfield plays the central character, initially credited simply as the Ploughman. He is presented as a grieving farmer whose family has been destroyed by the brutal conditions of the period. He is not introduced as some natural-born revolutionary or legendary hero. His resistance begins from desperation, which makes his eventual rise considerably more believable. He has lost enough that obedience to the Crown no longer makes sense.

What begins as local defiance soon spreads far beyond a single village. The Ploughman becomes connected with thousands of farmers, workers, and ordinary citizens who are prepared to take up arms against the royal authorities. Their destination is London, and their demands are much larger than simply reducing a tax. They want freedom, justice, and an end to the feudal system that keeps them tied to the land and their lords.

The closer the rebels get to the capital, the more unstable everything becomes. Greengrass reportedly stages the uprising through intense negotiations, chaotic hand-to-hand fighting, and a growing sense that neither side fully understands how far the situation has gone. The final confrontation places an army made up largely of ordinary people directly against the royal establishment.

That setup gives Garfield a difficult role. The Ploughman is not simply an action hero. He is a man being pushed into a position he never expected to occupy, and the interesting part will be watching how much of the reluctant farmer remains once thousands of people begin looking to him for direction.

The Cast Behind the 1381 Rebellion

A large part of the interest surrounding The Uprising comes from the ensemble. Greengrass has surrounded Garfield with a cast capable of making the political conflict feel personal rather than purely historical.

Garfield’s Ploughman may be the fictionalized center of the movie, but Cosmo Jarvis’ Wat Tyler represents the historical rebellion’s real military leadership. Tyler was one of the most important figures in the rising, and his relationship with the fictional protagonist should give the film plenty of room for tension over strategy and authority.

Jamie Bell plays John Ball, the radical priest whose preaching about equality helped give the rebels an ideological language for what they were doing. Ball’s role matters because the revolt was never only about money. There was a much deeper anger underneath it, built around the belief that the social order itself was fundamentally unjust.

Woody Norman, meanwhile, plays Richard II at only 14 years old. That casting choice puts a very young king in the middle of a crisis that would be frightening for an experienced ruler, never mind a teenager surrounded by nobles with their own agendas. Stephen Dillane’s Simon Sudbury represents another side of the establishment, as the unpopular Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor who becomes one of the main targets of the rebels’ fury.

The supporting cast includes Thomasin McKenzie as Alyce, Jonny Lee Miller as William Walworth, the Mayor of London, and Katherine Waterston as Joan of Kent.

Paul Greengrass Brings the Battlefield Down to Earth

If there is one thing I would expect from Greengrass, it is that he will not make medieval England look like a polished theme park.

His filmmaking style has always favored immediacy. Handheld cameras, tight close-ups, unstable movement and a documentary-like approach are all part of his visual language. Applied to a medieval uprising, that could make the violence feel unpleasantly close. And that is probably the right choice.

There is no reason for 1381 to look clean. These people are fighting in mud, wearing heavy clothing, surrounded by smoke, blood, dirt and frightened crowds. The production is reportedly using as many as 5,000 real extras and has constructed full-scale 14th-century villages across locations in Germany and England.

That physical scale could be one of the movie’s biggest strengths. Instead of making the Peasants’ Revolt feel like something happening to a handful of characters while a digital army waits somewhere in the background, The Uprising appears determined to make the rebellion feel crowded and uncontrollable.

And with an R rating in the United States for strong, bloody medieval violence and intense warfare, this is clearly not being positioned as a family-friendly Robin Hood adventure.

The Real Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

Understanding the real history makes the film’s premise considerably more interesting. The Great Rising of 1381 was not a random medieval riot. It came after decades of social and economic pressure that had been building across England.

The Black Death had devastated Europe and killed nearly half of England’s population. That terrible demographic collapse created an unusual problem for the ruling classes: there were suddenly far fewer workers available. Surviving laborers discovered that their work had become far more valuable, and many began demanding higher wages, greater freedom, and fewer restrictions.

The aristocracy did not respond kindly.

Instead, laws were introduced to control wages and prevent peasants from simply leaving their obligations to their lords. The same population crisis that had increased the value of labor therefore helped create an even sharper conflict between workers and the ruling class.

The immediate spark came in May 1381 in Essex. A royal official attempting to collect unpaid poll taxes encountered violent resistance from villagers. The official was driven away, and news of the confrontation spread rapidly.

Within weeks, thousands of people from Kent and Essex had taken up arms. Wat Tyler emerged as one of their principal leaders, while John Ball’s preaching helped give the movement a powerful ideological edge. The rebels then marched toward London.

They did not merely threaten the city from outside.

The rebels breached London’s gates, destroyed the luxurious Savoy Palace belonging to John of Gaunt, one of the most hated figures associated with the ruling establishment, and eventually stormed the Tower of London. Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was executed during the uprising.

King Richard II was forced to meet the rebels personally. The young king promised to meet their demands and offered assurances of freedom, but those promises did not last.

Once the rebel forces began to disperse, the ruling authorities turned against them. Wat Tyler was assassinated, and the remaining resistance was crushed with considerable brutality.

That history creates an obvious problem for any filmmaker trying to build a conventional heroic narrative around the rebellion. The real story does not end with a clean victory. The rebels lose. Their leaders are killed. Their demands are largely rejected. The political order survives.

And yet the uprising remains one of the defining examples of popular resistance in medieval England.

Why Robin Hood Suddenly Entered the Picture

This is the part that has caused the biggest argument around The Uprising.

For months, the film was being presented as a serious historical drama about the Peasants’ Revolt. Then Focus Features altered its US marketing and began using the tagline ‘Witness the Rise of Robin Hood.’

That one phrase changes the conversation completely.

The Robin Hood connection reportedly comes through William Langland’s 14th-century allegorical poem Piers Plowman, which was an important inspiration for Greengrass. The poem is also significant because it contains the earliest known written reference to Robin Hood.

So the connection is not completely pulled from thin air. There is a genuine historical and literary bridge between the world of the film and the Robin Hood legend.

But marketing is marketing.

And plenty of viewers immediately suspected that the studio had become nervous about selling an expensive historical drama about an English rebellion to American audiences who may know little or nothing about the events of 1381.

The Peasants’ Revolt is an important part of British history and is taught in British schools. In the United States, however, the average moviegoer is much more likely to recognize the name Robin Hood than Wat Tyler or John Ball.

From a box-office perspective, the decision makes obvious sense. Attach a familiar legendary name to the poster, and suddenly the movie has a hook that requires almost no explanation.

For history fans, though, that is precisely the problem.

Is This Still a Historical Drama or a Robin Hood Origin Story?

The reaction online has been sharply divided. Reddit discussions, YouTube film channels and social media commentators have spent plenty of time arguing over whether the Robin Hood branding improves the film’s appeal or undermines what originally made it interesting.

One concern is that a serious drama about class conflict could be turned into another conventional Hollywood hero story. The Peasants’ Revolt was messy, political and ultimately unsuccessful. Turning its central figure into Robin Hood risks sanding down those uncomfortable edges.

There is another way to look at it, though.

What if Robin Hood is not presented as the wealthy nobleman with perfect aim and a green tunic that audiences have seen a hundred times? What if the legend grows out of an exhausted, traumatized ploughman who has spent his life at the bottom of a brutal social hierarchy and finds himself fighting alongside real rebels during one of England’s most important uprisings?

That version is much more interesting to me.

It gives the myth a historical wound. Robin Hood would not simply appear because the screenplay needs a recognizable hero. The legend could grow out of the chaos surrounding the rebellion, gradually separating the historical man from the folk hero that later generations remember.

Whether the finished film actually commits to that idea is another question.

The marketing certainly suggests that the Robin Hood element will matter. How heavily it is integrated into the story could determine whether The Uprising feels like a bold reinterpretation or a historical film that received a last-minute commercial makeover.

What Makes The Uprising Stand Out

The strongest part of the concept is that the film has two identities fighting against each other.

On one side, there is the real history: the Black Death, poverty, taxation, feudal obligations, Wat Tyler, John Ball, Richard II and the violent suppression of the rebellion. On the other, there is Robin Hood, a legend that has been repeatedly rewritten by novels, television and cinema.

That conflict is potentially the entire point.

Greengrass is also an unusually fitting director for this material. His best work often focuses on ordinary people trapped inside enormous political events. That makes a medieval rebellion a natural fit for his style. The Ploughman can remain a human being rather than becoming a symbol too early.

Garfield is similarly well suited to that kind of character. His strongest performances tend to work when a character is emotionally exposed, conflicted or pushed beyond what he thinks he can handle. A grieving farmer gradually becoming the face of a rebellion gives him plenty to play with without requiring the character to be charismatic from the first scene.

Release Date and What to Expect

The Uprising is scheduled to open widely in US theaters on September 10, 2026, with Focus Features handling distribution. The United Kingdom release is set for October 9, 2026.

The R rating points toward a film that is going to lean hard into the physical reality of medieval warfare. Expect blood, close combat, political violence and an atmosphere that is much closer to survival drama than fantasy adventure.

I would not go into The Uprising expecting another cheerful Robin Hood adventure. Everything surrounding the production suggests something harsher. This is a story about people who have already survived plague, poverty and exploitation before deciding that the system itself has to be confronted.

The Robin Hood angle makes the film more commercially recognizable, but it also creates its biggest creative risk. If Greengrass uses the legend to explore how real historical resistance becomes mythology, the idea could work beautifully. If the movie simply turns the Ploughman into another polished Hollywood outlaw, it would lose the uncomfortable edge that makes the 1381 rebellion worth dramatizing in the first place.

For now, The Uprising looks caught between those two worlds: documented history on one side, centuries of folklore on the other. That tension is either going to be the film’s greatest strength or the thing that pulls it apart. Either way, it is much more interesting than another medieval story pretending that history was ever clean.