Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy speaks to Screen about the alchemy of his collaborative relationship with Christopher Nolan, and the science of embodying nuclear bomb creator J Robert Oppenheimer
It feels appropriate that one of the very last actors seen on the publicity circuit before the SAG-AFTRA strike should be one of the first Screen International speaks to following the strike’s conclusion almost five months later. Cillian Murphy was on red-carpet duties at Oppenheimer’s London premiere on July 13 when the industrial action commenced, with him and co-stars Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh and Rami Malek leaving the event midway through. Given the fevered anticipation for the film — which would go on to gross just shy of $1bn in cinemas globally via Universal Pictures — it was a remarkable platform for the strike, with Murphy centre stage. Not that it was ever planned that way.
“The timing was just totally serendipitous — it was totally coincidental,” he says, speaking on the phone from his room in a Los Angeles hotel in mid-November. “But it was a good forum for us to get the message out. A pretty emphatic display, I suppose.”
Public face
Murphy is away from his hometown of Dublin and back in Hollywood, banging the drum for Christopher Nolan’s devastating three-hour delve into the achievements and mistakes of J Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who steered the Manhattan Project during the Second World War, which saw the creation and detonation of the first nuclear bomb. It says a lot that Murphy, who has freely admitted to being publicity shy, was so quick to return and support the movie on the awards circuit. “It’s nice to be out in the world again, talking about the film,” he says.
Of course, it is not like he shut himself off from what was happening with Oppenheimer during his public absence. He and his fellow cast and crew members stayed in touch as they watched it become one of the most successful ever R-rated movies, while also memorably forming one half of an unlikely double bill with Greta Gerwig’s simultaneously released Barbie.
“We were all on our little chat groups, everybody updating everybody else about how it was going,” Murphy recalls. “We were completely knocked out by the response and by the box office.” And what did he make of ‘Barbenheimer’? “It was a great reflection on the state of the industry right now, with such diversity in cinemas over the summer,” he says, before confirming that he has seen Barbie and that he enjoyed it. But what impressed Murphy most is how much Oppenheimer connected with younger audiences. “I have teenage boys, and they and their friends have been to see it multiple times. It’s very heartening to think that a film so provocative and challenging, and which interrogates big, big issues and big moral dilemmas, can be appealing to young people. It was beyond our imaginings.”
The theme of acute but pleasant surprise threads through the conversation. When reflecting on the phone call he received from Nolan offering him the role, Murphy describes his response as “a combination of shock and extraordinary adrenaline and excitement”.
He had already worked with Nolan on five films, starting with 2005’s Batman Begins — in which Murphy played the villainous psychopharmacologist Dr Jonathan Crane, aka the Scarecrow — and including 2010’s Inception (as an industrialist’s heir in whose subconscious most of the action takes place) and 2017’s Dunkirk (as a traumatised British soldier).
But while Murphy was well used to receiving roles from Nolan, they had all been supporting parts. “I’d always secretly harboured the ambition to play a lead for him,” he admits. Now he had a golden opportunity — in the form of the most complex, difficult and challenging lead role in any of Nolan’s movies. Or that Murphy himself had ever played.
“He’s such an unknowable character in so many ways,” says Murphy of Oppenheimer. “Such a contradiction. So flawed. So brilliant. So naïve. There were so many layers to him.”
He spent six months researching the man — “an awful lot of reading, an awful lot of archive material on the internet” — but, even after that, he finds Oppenheimer difficult to define. “People ask me, ‘What did you learn about him at the end of all this?’ and I’ve realised that I just think he was a human being,” says Murphy. “He may have been one of the most brilliant men to have ever lived, but he was ultimately a human being. I’m afraid I can’t give you one really succinct, coherent soundbite on him. He’s just too multifaceted for me to do that.”
As well as wrestling with the controversial scientist’s expansive and paradoxical mind, Murphy also had to reshape himself to inhabit his physique: a long, rigorous process, though not one that is new to him. “I remember doing it for Tommy Shelby,” he says, referring to his signature role in the BBC/Netflix TV show Peaky Blinders, which ran for six seasons. “He’s a very physical, capable character who’s been decorated in the First World War. And I’m a reasonably sized cowardly Irishman! So I had to condition my body to meet the character. Similarly, with Oppenheimer, I had to condition my body in a different way.”
Yet it was not merely a case of losing weight. “He was ashamed of how slight he was, and self-conscious about it. But he managed to style it out. You know — the hat and the trousers and the cut of the suit. So I worked very closely with the costume designer [Ellen Mirojnick] and Chris to accentuate that. David Bowie was a very early reference for us — it’s clearly a period film but we wanted audiences to feel they could connect to it. It was a very exciting process. I love that part of the job.”
First impressions
Nolan’s film is extremely subjective, pulling in so close to Oppenheimer that viewers spend a sizeable portion of the film inside the man’s head. Indeed, when the script arrived, Murphy was intrigued to find it written in the first person. “I knew from the beginning this was going to be different, and this was going to be seen through Oppenheimer’s eyes.”
Did this intensify the pressure of playing his first lead role for Nolan? “I suppose,” Murphy allows. “But when you have a director as insanely talented as Chris, and when you have a relationship with the director like I do with Chris, and also when you have the level of technical expertise and skill he has with his crew and his cast — he cast the best actors in the world to play alongside in this movie — you feel very secure.”
Besides, he adds, the weight of responsibility is something an actor cannot carry into a performance. “Acting is always a process of letting go and trying to be in the moment. It can be quite a meditative state of mind you want to arrive at — to be honest, to be clear, to be true.”
Murphy first met Nolan in 2003, when he was called in to screentest for the character of Batman — a role that ultimately went to Christian Bale. “I always knew I wasn’t right for it,” says Murphy, “but Chris saw something in me at that screentest. And then the relationship began.”
It is obvious the pair have a great rapport, and much in common, too, Murphy believes. “I think we’re both extremely serious about the work. We’re both completely committed to doing the absolute best and pushing ourselves.
”I’ve learned a huge amount from him just being on his sets, and watching his dedication, rigour and focus. There are no distractions. The ancillary nature of this business, and all the hot air that is attendant to it, he has no interest in. And neither do I. We’ve developed this clear shorthand over the years, and I would do anything for him. I would love to be in any of his films.”
It is too soon to know what Nolan’s next film will be, or whether it will be their seventh collaboration. Yet Murphy is sure the director will “continue to surprise us and continue to push the envelope”, whatever he does. Oppenheimer “may be his magnum opus”, says Murphy, but only “for now”. In the meantime, Murphy will continue to choose his roles as he has always done — by following his instincts.
“I couldn’t write a manifesto on what it is that I hate and what it is that I love,” he says. “I know instinctively what it is when I read it. But you do begin to focus, and things begin to clarify as you get older.”
He has certainly loved playing inter-war gangster Shelby, though his mooted return to the role for a narrative-wrapping Peaky Blinders film remains unconfirmed. “I haven’t any update for you on that,” Murphy apologises. “Obviously between the writers and actors strikes, it’s been tricky to make any progress. But as soon as there is any, I’m sure you guys will be the first to know!”
Next up is an adaptation of Irish writer Claire Keegan’s 2022 Booker Prize shortlisted Small Things Like These, directed by fellow Peaky Blinders alumnus Tim Mielants, and produced by Murphy under his freshly minted Big Things Films, founded with Alan Moloney (Brooklyn, Marlowe). In what should prove another layered role, Murphy stars as small-town Irish coal merchant Bill Furlong, who makes a life-changing discovery during the run-up to Christmas in 1985. “That’s the sort of work I’m leaning into and attracted to,” says Murphy.
Although, after almost three decades in the business, the actor admits to feeling like a work in progress. “Early in my career I read something that I think Sydney Pollack said, ‘It takes 30 years to make an actor.’ I’ve been doing it for 27 years, so I feel like I’m probably close to being able to call myself an actor…”
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