Cillian Murphy is now a household name thanks to his highly acclaimed, Oscar-nominated performance in Oppenheimer, a film that has established itself as a modern classic. Early in his career, Murphy drew critical acclaim for his roles in Irish independent films like the Palme d’Or Winner The Winds That Shake The Barley and Neil Jordan‘s Breakfast on Pluto. Then, Murphy’s collaborations with Christopher Nolan on The Dark Knight trilogy and Inception were enough to boost his star power. He then gained the leading role in the widely popular BBC/Netflix production of Peaky Blinders. But a lesser-known project of his is a World War II spy film that paired him up with Jamie Dornan. 2016’s Anthropoid is a brilliant spy drama that showed Murphy’s talents as a leading man, and examined a different side of the espionage genre.
What Is ‘Anthropoid’ About?
In the wake of his incredible turn as Dr. Jonathan Crane in Batman Begins, Murphy was sadly not granted many similarly complex roles in mainstream American films. While Nolan saw a complex character who used his manipulative techniques and intelligence to become one of Batman’s most ruthless nemeses, Hollywood saw a quirky international actor who could easily be placed in thankless villain or morally ambiguous roles in films like Tron: Legacy, Red Lights, In Time, and Transcendence. However, the same mix of professionalism and deceptiveness Murphy showed in Batman Begins helped him in the role of a real-life spy in the criminally underrated 2016 World War II thriller Anthropoid.
Based on a riveting, and tragically not well-known true story, Anthropoid follows the doomed plight of the spies working for the Czechoslovak government-in-exileduring the height of World War II. The film earned its title from “Operation Anthropoid,” which was the spies’ codename for their planned assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the powerful leader within the Third Reich that served as the third-in-command to Adolf Hitler. The Czechoslovak soldiers Jozef Gabčík (Murphy) and Jan Kubiš (Dornan) are tasked with going undercover in the Nazi-occupied city of Prague to prepare for the assassination alongside a group of local allies.
Like any great spy film, Anthropoid develops the complex mindset that these men must be in as they plot their mission and try to maintain their secret identities. Taking out one of the most powerful men in the world is not a simple matter of firing a gunshot, and the actual Operation Anthropoid required the spies to go undercover for several months in order to map out when Heydrich would arrive and how they could pull off their assassination. The restraint that Murphy shows in talking about his mission does not reflect any emotional distance from the character; rather, it shows how committed Jozef was to the plan and his knowledge of its importance. It shows the respect that Murphy has for a real hero whose actions have sadly been largely unrepresented in the history of World War II in cinema.
