Paul Greengrass Turns Medieval Fury Into A Modern Pressure Cooker
Dig out the first official trailer for The Uprising, a bruising historical drama starring Andrew Garfield as an ordinary farmer pulled into the center of England’s ferocious Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
Garfield plays Ploughman, a grieving survivor whose family has been taken by the plague. When another crushing tax pushes his village beyond endurance, he becomes the unlikely face of an army built from people the ruling class never expected to fight back.
The film comes from writer-director Paul Greengrass, whose best work thrives on institutions collapsing in real time. Here, the filmmaker behind United 93, Captain Phillips and two of the sharpest Bourne films trades modern panic for mud, steel and medieval class warfare.
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The real uprising exploded across England after years of labor restrictions, social pressure and repeated taxation. The Black Death had killed enormous numbers of people, leaving surviving workers more valuable, but the ruling order kept trying to drag wages and movement back under tighter control.
By 1381, a new poll tax helped ignite what resentment had already prepared. Villages mobilized, rebels marched toward London and the teenage King Richard II suddenly faced a mass movement demanding something the powerful had little interest in surrendering: dignity, freedom and a different share of the future.
Greengrass appears less interested in treating that history like a polished royal pageant than in dropping viewers inside the fear and momentum of collective revolt. The trailer moves through burning fields, crowded streets, armored violence and Garfield’s Ploughman realizing that survival may require becoming a symbol.
That makes The Uprising a natural fit for Garfield’s emotional intensity. He can play fragile grief without losing the sense that something volatile is building underneath it, and the first footage gives him plenty of room to move from stunned farmer to battlefield leader.
The cast is stacked around him. Jamie Bell, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Cosmo Jarvis, Thomasin McKenzie, Jonny Lee Miller, Woody Norman and Katherine Waterston all enter Greengrass’s smoke-filled version of 14th-century England.
The first trailer promises no delicate museum-piece affair. Bodies hit the ground, villages burn and the Crown answers unrest with force. Mister Garfield may begin as Ploughman, but the film is clearly preparing to turn him into the face of a rebellion that refuses to remain beneath anyone’s boot.
The Uprising opens exclusively in theaters on September 11, 2026.
Watch Andrew Garfield Lead The Uprising’s First Official Trailer
The first footage follows Ploughman from plague-stricken farmer to leader of an army challenging King Richard II in Paul Greengrass’s historical epic.
Source: Focus Features; People.
