For nearly 30 years, Cillian Murphy has built an unimpeachable body of work as one of our most versatile actors—while somehow also staying cleverly out of sight. Now, as an Oscar front-runner, the Oppenheimer star pulls back the curtain (just a bit).
In the fall of 2021, Christopher Nolan knew just where to find Cillian Murphy. The director flew to Ireland with a document in his carry-on, Hollywood’s equivalent of the nuclear football. It was a script for his top secret new film, printed, apparently, on red paper. “Which is supposedly photocopy-proof,” Murphy explained. He wasn’t surprised by the in-person visit. The two had worked together on five previous films, and every Nolan script, Murphy said, had been dropped off by Nolan or one of his family members. “So, like, it’s been his mom who’s delivered the script to me before. Or his brother, he’ll go away and come back in three hours. Part of it has to do with keeping the story secret before it goes out. But part of it has to do with tradition. They’ve always done it this way, so why stop now? It does add a ritual to it, which I really appreciate. It suits me.”
Murphy met Nolan at his Dublin hotel room—and then Nolan left him to read. He read and read and read. All 197 pages, the rarest kind of script, written in the first person of the film’s protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. All action, all incidence, swirling around this character—a big-brained, psychologically complex giant of world history. Murphy had never played a lead in a Nolan film before, but had committed to this role as soon as Nolan told him about it, before he’d even seen a page of the script. “He’d already called me and said he wanted me to play the part. And I had said Yes—because I always say Yes to him.” The afternoon ran out. “And he doesn’t have a phone or anything,” Murphy said. “But he knew instinctively when to come back.” Nolan in command of time, as ever. They spent the rest of the evening together—and then Murphy took the DART train home, and got to work.
The result was one of the most watched and most acclaimed films of 2023—a nearly billion-dollar blockbuster about a tormented genius (and, yes, the father of the atomic bomb). The performance affirmed for many what has been quietly known for some time: that Cillian Murphy is, or at least was, one of the most underrated actors in all of Hollywood. In small potent roles in those other Nolan films. As a shape-shifting bit player and lead in dozens of films and plays over the past three decades. And, of course, across 10 years and six seasons of Peaky Blinders—the hit series that made him truly known globally. “Some years ago,” Christopher Nolan said, “I made what was probably a mistake in some moment of drunken sincerity of telling him he’s the best actor of his generation. And so now he gets to show that to the rest of the world so everybody can realize that.”
Part of the reason that Murphy still felt like something of a secret until recently is that he lives, breathes, and presides at a remove from the noise. This is by design. In 2015, Murphy returned home to Ireland from London, already some distance from Hollywood proper, to a quiet hamlet on the Irish Sea—not exactly off the grid, but one ring still further outside the blast radius of his industry.
One evening this winter, I took the DART down the seacoast from Dublin City Centre to Monkstown to have dinner with Murphy. We met at a restaurant where, he told me, “I have a usual table, would you believe it?” A statement encircled in neon pride for how much it emphasized that he did not have a usual table anywhere else. He slunk there comfortably for much of the night, bouncing, leaning forward, floppy rocker-dad hair swept casually across his forehead, his famously light eyes drawing in passersby like two pockets of quicksand.
Murphy and his wife of 20 years, artist Yvonne McGuinness, live by the sea with their two teenage sons. In Ireland, the abundance of their creative existence is all around them. The art galleries all seem to be filled with work by his family members. The music on the radio is curated by friends—or Murphy himself. There are occasional pints with his elder Irish actor idols, Brendan Gleeson and Stephen Rea.
Life here for Murphy is filled with, well, life. His boys are approaching exit velocity. There are exams. Chores. Errands. He and his youngest were flying out in the morning to attend a soccer match in Liverpool. “I would’ve taken you elsewhere for some Guinness,” Murphy said, “except I have to drive to drop my boy off at a party tonight.” The brand of busyness all felt quite far from the bubbles that typically cocoon the leading men in the film industry.
“I have a couple of friends who are actors but a majority of them are not,” Murphy said. “The majority of my buddies are not in the business. I also love not working. And I think for me a lot of research as an actor is just fucking living, and, you know, having a normal life doing regular things and just being able to observe, and be, in that sort of lovely flow of humanity. If you can’t do that because you’re going from film festival to movie set to promotions…I mean that’s The Bubble. I’m not saying that makes you any better or less as an actor, but it’s just a world that I couldn’t exist in. I find it would be very limiting on what you can experience as a human being, you know?”
Cillian Murphy, at least on one weekend this winter, seemed to me to have something so deeply figured out that I spent the month after our time together unable to shake the experience of being in the presence of someone living so much the way that so many other actors—so many artists, so many people—claim to want to live. Away from it all, but in highest demand. Delivering Oscar-worthy performances, while also seeming convincingly content to disappear for a long while, at any point, no questions. The stabilizing forces at home seemed to work as an anchor point from which to go off and wander as an artist. “He has this rare blend of humility with this supercharge of creativity,” Emily Blunt said. “He’s just a lovely, sane person. He’s so, so sane. And yet he’s got such wildness in him in the parts that he’s able to play.”
He was the first of his friends to have kids, and thus will be the first with an empty nest. More time for movies. (Maybe.) More time for music. (Certainly.) More time to go on runs at night, when the lights streaking by make him feel like he’s going faster. Even more time for sleep: “I sleep a lot. I do 10-hour sleeps.” He seemed immune to the need to be in the mix—of fame, of fashion, of free dinners, the titillating offerings of a scene. A lot of actors age out of that compulsion, but the thing is, he’s not old. Forty-seven. At the height of his powers, entering his prime. Not exiting the industry, but just floating lightly beside, until called upon, which he often is, and will be more now than ever.
He tries to do one movie a year, preferably not in summer, when he likes to spend most of his time on the west coast of Ireland doing nothing much but finding new music for his radio program on BBC 6 or walking his black Lab, Scout. He is perfectly happy to be “unemployed” while he waits for the right new film to come his way. “There could’ve been a situation when Chris called me up that I was doing something else,” he said. “And that would’ve been the worst of all scenarios.” In this way, he seems to adhere to his version of Michael Pollan’s adage toward healthy eating: “Make movies. Not too many. Mostly with Christopher Nolan.” Imagine the discipline, the confidence, the peace of mind, to not worry about missing an opportunity, a lunch, a party, a fork in the road back in one of the frothier Hollywood hubs, but rather to stroll along emerald shores, as the days stretch out till 10 at night, knowing that they know you—and that ultimately they know where to find you.
In Monkstown. Probably at his table. Looking present. Clear-eyed. Like any local, but with more moisture in his skin. At dinner, he asked me just once not to put something in the piece: a nuanced take he shared on a local establishment. Nothing so dangerous as an unwelcome opinion in a small town. No truer sign of someone “just fucking living” there. The dream.
Nolan had first seen Murphy in 2003, in a promotional image for 28 Days Later that had run in the San Francisco Chronicle. “I was looking to cast Batman, looking for some actors to screen-test, and I was just very struck by his eyes, his appearance, everything about him, wanted to find out more,” Nolan told me. “When I met him, he didn’t strike me as necessarily right for Batman. But there was just a vibe—there are people you meet in your life who you just want to stay connected with, work with, you try to find ways to create together.” So Nolan put him on camera just to see what happened. “He first performed as Bruce Wayne, and I saw the crew stop and pay attention in a way that I had never seen before, and really never seen since. And it was this electricity just coming off the guy, it was an incredible energy. And so I called some executives, and they were impressed enough with him that they let me cast him as Scarecrow. Those Batman villains at the time had only ever been played by huge stars — Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger. So, it’s just a testament to his raw talent.”
Batman Begins was the first of his smaller roles in Nolan’s three Batman movies, Inception, and Dunkirk. “I hope he won’t mind me saying, but when I first worked with him, he was all pure instinct, and the technical side of acting wasn’t something that had registered as important with him. We would literally put a mark down and he would just walk right over it,” Nolan said, laughing. But over two decades, “as I saw him develop his technical facility, it did not in any way distract or diminish the instinctive nature of his performance.”
For the lead in Oppenheimer, Murphy prepared at home for six months, focusing first on the voice and the silhouette (in other words, shedding weight to reflect the skin and bones of a world-renowned physicist who subsisted primarily on martinis and cigarettes during his years developing the bomb). On set, as the days of filming piled on in the New Mexico desert, the specialness of what Murphy was up to started to spread across the set among the cast and crew “like a rumor,” Nolan said. “I remember the same thing with Heath Ledger on The Dark Knight.”
Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer’s beleaguered wife, Kitty, first got to know Murphy well on A Quiet Place Part II. “Cillian’s really kidnapping to be in a scene with. He pulls you into this vibrational vortex,” she told me. “He loves a party. But when he’s working, he’s intensely focused, and won’t socialize very much at all. Certainly not on Oppenheimer, I mean he didn’t have anything left in the tank to say one word to someone at the end of the day.”
Matt Damon told me that when they were shooting out in the middle of New Mexico, he and Blunt and the rest of the cast would go down and eat at this one little café. “It was like a mess tent,” he said. “And Cillian was invited every night, but never made it once.”
Murphy was back in his room, preserving his energy, prepping for the next day, minding the Oppenheimer silhouette.
“Okay, he’s losing weight, he can’t eat at night, you know he’s miserable,” Damon said. “But you know he’s doing what’s best for the movie that you all want to be as good as possible, and so you’re cheering him on. But at dinner you’re sitting there and you’re all shaking your heads going, Man, this is brutal.”
“The one thing that he would allow himself, his one luxury, is that he would take a bath at night. I mean he would allow himself literally a few almonds or something. And then sit in his bath with his script and just work. By himself, every night.”
The performance is so big, but so much of it is invisible to the audience, in the concentrated intensity of the interpretation. The nucleus. Toward which so many elements subtly draw us closer to his character. Just one example: If it were period accurate, Murphy said, everyone would be smoking and wearing hats, but he’s the only one doing either. “It’s emphatic, but subliminally so.” The author Kai Bird, who cowrote the monumental biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, upon which the film is based, spent a day at the Los Alamos set watching Murphy play the scene where Oppenheimer talks to his team of scientists about the bomb while someone drops marbles into a fishbowl and a snifter. “At one point during a break, he approached wearing his baggy brown suit and turquoise belt and I raised my arms and shouted, ‘Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Oppenheimer, I’ve been waiting decades to meet you!’ ” Bird said. “He especially captured the voice and Oppie’s intensity.” (At one point during our conversation, Bird asked me to confirm: “Those are his blue eyes, right? Or is he wearing lenses?”)
The film was released on Barbenheimer weekend, just after the SAG-AFTRA strike began, and despite enjoying some lighter time with Blunt, Damon, and the cast, Murphy was relieved to cut short the promotion of the film. “I think it’s a broken model,” he said of red-carpet interviews and junkets. Outdated and a drag for actors. “The model is—everybody is so bored.” Look what happened when they went on strike, he said. It all stopped. But the fact that the film was good, and Barbie was good, two at the same time, people going crazy—it just shows you don’t need it. “Same was the case with Peaky Blinders. The first three seasons there was no advertising, a tiny show on BBC Two; it just caught fire because people talked to each other about it.”
Murphy’s reticence in many interviews is palpable. “It’s like Joanne Woodward said,” he told me. “‘Acting is like sex—do it, don’t talk about it.’ ” Although I wouldn’t characterize his disposition on, say, late-night TV as gruff, he’s basically just incapable of going full phony. He is, in other words, reacting the way you might to being asked the same question for the hundredth time in a week. I’m curious to watch him suffer through his first Oscar campaign, where answering the same questions about his performance is basically the point for several months.
“People always used to say to me, ‘He has reservations’ or ‘He’s a difficult interviewee,’ ” Murphy said. “Not really! I love talking about work, about art. What I struggle with, and find unnecessary, and unhelpful about what I want to do, is: ‘Tell me about yourself…’ ”
Nonetheless: He grew up in Cork. Went to Catholic school better suited for a certain kind of athletic boy than an artistic soul. “I always fucking hated team sports. I like watching them. But I was terrible at them,” he said. That classic system for schooling was not good for him, “emotionally and psychologically,” he said. “But at least it gave me something to push against.”
He played in a successful band with his brother, half-heartedly entered the local university as a law student. While in school in Cork, he stumbled into a performance of A Clockwork Orange and fell in with the stage scene there. He hadn’t trained in any way, but he got the first role he ever auditioned for, in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs, which traveled around the UK, Europe, and Canada, and transformed his life. “It all happened to me in one month, in August ’96: We got offered a record deal, I failed my law exams, I got the part in Disco Pigs, and I met my wife,” he said. “I now look back and go: Oh, shit, I didn’t know then how important all these things were—the sort of domino effect that they would have on my life.” I asked Murphy, who has, in the past, said he identified as an atheist, if such a confluence ever made him wonder if there was indeed a higher power organizing all of this. “Ohhh,” he said. “I love the chaos and the randomness. I love the beauty of the unexpected.”
That winter weekend, while walking around Dublin, on a bit of a Joycean ramble, we passed a bookstore. “This was my favorite bookshop when I first moved up to Dublin. I didn’t have any money and I was living with my mother-in-law. And I would come in here and get a coffee for 50p, but then they would, like, refill it, you know? So, I’d sit in there all day and just read plays and then put them back on the shelves, and then go home and my mother-in-law would feed me dinner,” he said. “Just to educate myself. To catch up. ’Cause I didn’t go to drama school, so I’d read all the plays I should’ve read if I went to drama school. I’d ask all these writers and directors to tell me all the plays that I must read.”
“Theater is the key to Cillian,” director Danny Boyle told me. “Weirdly, given that he is such an extraordinary film actor.” That ability, from the theater, to travel the great distance of an extreme character arc. “Everybody talks about his dreamy Paul Newman eyes. And all that’s to his advantage, of course, because behind is this capacity, this reach that he has into volcanic energy.” (The other key to Cillian, Boyle said, is that he’s a bloody Irishman: “He’s one of the great, great exports, and the homeland clearly nourishes him constantly.”) Boyle cast Murphy in 2002’s 28 Days Later, the first film of Murphy’s that made him known. It led, in its way, to the Nolan partnership, as well to working with Boyle again on 2007’s Sunshine. “When we did 28 Days Later, he was really just starting off,” Boyle said. “By the time he came back for Sunshine, he was a seriously accomplished actor.”
In the aughts, Murphy was working frequently, in some movies that were better than others. “Many of my films I haven’t seen,” he said. “I know that Johnny Depp would always say that, but it’s actually true. Generally the ones I haven’t seen are the ones I hear are not good.”
I asked him if he’s seen Oppenheimer.
“Yes, I’ve seen Oppenheimer…” he said, rolling his eyes.
When Nolan finished the film, Murphy, his wife, and his younger son flew to Los Angeles to watch it for the first time in Nolan’s private screening room. “It’s pretty nice…” he said, trying to balance obvious enthusiasm with not giving too much away. “You know, he shows film prints there. The sound is extraordinary.” How many seats? “Uh, I’d say maybe 50?” So, Murphy did see this film of his—in perhaps the most dialed-in home theater known to man.
In the summer of 2005, just a couple months after Batman Begins came out, Murphy was back in theaters with Wes Craven’s Red Eye. It was villain season. And the two roles, in close quarters, seemed to coalesce around a feeling: That guy creeps me out. When casually canvasing people about what they think of when they think of Murphy, I was shocked by the imprint that Red Eye had on an American of a certain age.
“Oh, I know, it’s crazy!” Murphy said. “I think it’s the duality of it. It’s why I wanted to play it. That two thing. The nice guy and the bad guy in one. The only reason it appealed to me is you could do that”—he snapped his fingers—“that turn, you know?”
“They say the nicest people sometimes make the best villains,” Rachel McAdams said, recalling her time with Murphy on the cramped airplane set of Red Eye. “We’d listen to music and gab away while doing the crossword puzzle, which he brought every day and would graciously let me chime in on.… I think the number one question I got about Cillian way back then was whether or not he wore contact lenses.”
“I love Rachel McAdams and we had fun making it,” Murphy said. “But I don’t think it’s a good movie. It’s a good B movie.”
