We won’t pretend to speak for Cillian Murphy (though that is currently one of the few options at our disposal), but the Irish actor may well see some upsides to the sudden moratorium on promotional duties.
Christopher Nolan was in Leicester Square nine days ago to introduce the premiere of his much-anticipated Oppenheimer. Murphy, who plays J Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb”, in the sprawling epic, was conspicuous by his sudden absence. Co-stars Robert Downey jnr, Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt were equally elsewhere.
“You’ve seen them here earlier on the red carpet,” Nolan explained. “Unfortunately, they are off to write their picket signs for what we believe to be an imminent strike by SAG, joining one of my guilds, the Writers Guild, in the struggle for fair wages for working members of their union.”
No doubt Murphy would have been happy to help out. But, over the last 25 years, he has been uneasy about the promotional business. He was in the acting game for over a decade before appearing on his first chatshow. He is not the only actor to recoil from opening up to strangers on red carpets, but he remains more forceful in his reluctance than most.
“My job is to portray other people,” he told me in 2021. “The less that people know about me the better I can portray other people. That seems glaringly obvious and logical to me.”
The cone of silence lowers as Murphy reaches a new high in a notable career. Following early stage success with Corcadorca in his native Cork, he secured his first significant film role in Danny Boyle’s bone-rattling horror 28 Days Later from 2002. He became a regular in the Nolan stock company with performances in that director’s Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception.
He was placed at the centre of the hugely popular TV show Peaky Blinders. But none of this brings the same level of attention as playing the title role in a $100 million biopic. To this point, Murphy has come across as a character actor – extremely good-looking, but not in a way Hollywood expects – who has found himself taking lead roles. He is a dab hand at oddballs. And there are few balls odder than Oppenheimer.
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Taking inspiration from Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s book American Prometheus, the film gives Murphy free rein to explore the physicist’s eccentricities. He famously left a poisoned apple (uneaten, thank goodness) for his tutor when at Cambridge. We are left with a genius believably tortured by the decisions other people made following, in the summer of 1945, the first successful detonation of an A-bomb. There is weirdness and vulnerability in there. Those are characteristics Murphy has traded in since he shifted towards acting at the end of the last century.
If you know anything about Cillian Murphy’s early life you probably know that rock music’s loss was the theatre’s gain. Raised in Ballintemple, he is the child of educators. Mum was a French teacher. Dad worked for the Department of Education. He “did well in the Leaving” and made his way, with measured enthusiasm, to study law at UCC.
Meanwhile, he and his pals had been creating complex, wacky tunes with their band The Sons of Mr Green Genes (named for, of all unfashionable things, a song from Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats). There is another part of the metaverse in which Murphy has, now a rock veteran, just completed a third successive Saturday-night slot on the Second Stage at Glastonbury. He has the cheekbones for a rock star. Those famous, piercing blue eyes could generate a cult on their own.
The band allegedly secured a decent offer from a British label. Back in 2012, I asked him if he ever mourned the road not taken.
“There was a time when I felt that,” he said. “But now I am more confident. I always knew there was a ceiling that I had as a musician, and I feel that was reached pretty quickly. But with acting I feel like I have more to prove. Also, the music industry has changed. It’s so hard to make money.”
Murphy will, no doubt, regret that, less than a year before the release of Oppenheimer, Corcadorca, the great independent theatre company that gave him his break, closed its doors for good. The legend goes he saw the company performing an adaptation of A Clockwork Orange and knew instantly that is where he wanted to be. His first lead role came opposite Eileen Walsh in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs. Following a pair of off-beam teenagers as they ramble through “Pork City”, the 1996 production was a sensation and eventually became a film directed by Kirsten Sheridan.
“Everybody knows Disco Pigs changed everything for me,” he told Peter Crawley for this newspaper on the play’s 20th anniversary. “It was the first thing I ever did, and it formed me totally. It’s hard not to be nostalgic about these things. But it really was a brilliant time for me. It was the confidence of youth – or the ignorance of youth. Maybe a combination of both. Trying to get to that level again was a struggle.”
There has been amusing discussion about Murphy’s physical suitability for the role of Oppenheimer. Surely he is too young to play the gaunt, furrowed scientist at the point of his great triumph. In fact, the actor, at 47, is a full seven years older than Oppenheimer at the time of the Trinity test. The slim, sapphire-eyed youth who emerged from Disco Pigs and went on to flee zombies in 28 Days Later seems oddly unchanged by the passing decades. Mind you, Tom Cruise, 15 years his senior, can boast the same.
In 2002, when 28 Days Later opened, the nation was still mildly surprised to find an Irish actor at the heart of a major motion picture. Colin Farrell, born in the same year as Murphy, was up there in Minority Report, but who could have guessed, after early inconveniences, the Dubliner would play the game so skilfully and prosper into his forties. Saoirse Ronan was five years away from her Oscar nomination for Atonement. Michael Fassbender was taking small roles in Band of Brothers and NCS: Manhunt. Paul Mescal was seven years old. The current Irish bossing of Hollywood was a long way off.
Whether consciously or not, Murphy found himself keeping the career on a steady simmer over the succeeding 20 years. He had stage success. Reviewing his 2002 turn in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things at the Gate for this paper, Fintan O’Toole remarked: “Murphy measures out his metamorphosis with an impressive subtlety and intelligence.” Nolan caught the appeal early on and cast him as The Scarecrow in Batman Begins from 2005. He returned to the role for The Dark Knight. Neil Jordan allowed Murphy his biggest challenge yet when he cast him as a transgender Northerner in an adaptation of Pat McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto in 2005 (a decision that might cause some furrowing of brows today). The role was typical of an actor steering away from the tempting perils of mainstream blockbusters to seek thornier challenges.
The apparent stability of his home life reinforced that sense of a safe ship being piloted steadily forward. The word “apparent” is there to press home his continuing resistance to prying or probing. You couldn’t quite call him an enigma. He does not – so far as we are aware – spend his summers among any sinister cults. He has no expensively vulgar movie-star hobbies. In 2004, he married Yvonne McGuinness, an artist whom he met in his budding rock star days, and began the raising of two sons in London before moving them all back to Dublin in 2015.
“Well, I suppose to be closer to family,” he told me in 2021. “The kids are of a certain age. I think if you live in a world capital – like New York or London or wherever – it’s excellent and exciting and stimulating in your 20s and 30s. Then there’s a point where the things that were excellent and stimulating are now a bit sort of tedious and draining. You want something quieter and that’s what we did.”
Such is the nature of Oppenheimer – a huge biopic from a prestige director – there would be talk of an Oscar nomination if Murphy were merely adequate in the role. As it transpires, he owns the film
Yet for all the assertions of normality, there remains a mystery – if not quite that enigma – about what Cillian Murphy does on screen. There always seems to be something held strategically back. There is a tension within him that hints at impending explosion. That unease helped Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley, in which he played a rebel in the War of Independence, to the Palme d’Or at the 2006 Cannes film festival.
There is a campaigning side to his personality. Last year, Ionbhá: The Empathy Book for Ireland, a collection of essays and poems he edited to support the “Activating Social Empathy” education programme, was published by Mercier Press. “The book was something that we had been talking about for ages, just to try and get this idea of empathy into the common vernacular/vocabulary,” he said following the book’s release. He supported the 2007 Rock the Vote campaign. He is a patron of the Unesco Child and Family Research Centre at the University of Galway. Murphy may not enjoy putting himself before interrogators, but he does allow whispers of the inner man to emerge.
And yet. Looking back through his interviews, again and again you get the sense of a man who wants the wider world to know him only through his work. More Paul Schofield than Oliver Reed. More Scott Walker than Sean Ryder.
“There’s no baggage,” he told me over a decade ago. “They haven’t seen you being funny on a talkshow. They just get the character. I could never be funny on a talkshow. ... I am not that sort of person. I know what I am good at, and being funny on a talkshow is not what I am at.”
Nobody knows how long the strike will last. Fran Drescher, the admirable president of actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, sounded determined in her rousing speeches last week. Brian Cox is among those who feels the dispute, largely concerning residuals on streaming services and the threat of artificial intelligence, could drag on until the end of the year. There is, thus, a decent chance that Murphy could avoid that one turn in luckier actors’ lives when there is near-irresistible pressure to be “funny on a talkshow”.
Such is the nature of Oppenheimer – a huge biopic from a prestige director – there would be talk of an Oscar nomination if Murphy were merely adequate in the role. As it transpires, he owns the film, finding a scratchy intensity that communicates the momentousness of the subject’s commission. He gets to deliver Oppenheimer’s famous line twice and twice masters every vowel and consonant. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” the scientist said, quoting the Bhagavad-gita. Murphy gets to coil up tensely when the authorities come for him during the McCarthyite witch-hunts. He has moments of qualified elation.
It would be astonishing if his name were not there when the nominations are announced on January 24th. Most contenders have yet to screen. Maybe Joaquin Phoenix could be there for Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Adam Driver might make some noise in Michael Mann’s Ferrari. Away from biopics, Paul Giamatti looks possible in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. But Murphy is currently the one holding all the cards.
In any normal year, the horrors of “awards season” would loom. Remember how, last time, the gallant Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, ultimately both nominated for The Banshees of Inisherin, launched a double-act at the Venice Film Festival in September that played every talkshow for the succeeding six months.
Murphy will be expected to do silly video things, more serious print profiles and cheery stints on food shows. He will be expected to accept largely made-up Turny Awards – given to celebs who turn-up – at events in desert retreats and mountaintop ski resorts. Even the most gregarious find their will to live sapped. Obviously, as a sound Cork man, he will want the strike settled quickly and wish his colleagues back to work. But he could be forgiven for savouring a few months’ peace.
“There’s no trick to it,” he once told me, pondering the privacy he maintains. “It’s not a problem if you live a reasonably normal life and don’t go to events that are not obligatory.”
Good luck with that.
Oppenheimer is in cinemas
Ten milestones in Cillian Murphy’s career
It has largely been plain and steady sailing for Murphy. So there are few massive jumps up the ladder. Just a confident drift through the business called show.
Disco Pigs (1996)
It all began with this performance opposite Eileen Walsh in Corcadorca’s ground-breaking play about two kids adrift in a nightmarish version of contemporary Cork. “You are always kind of reaching towards having that experience again,” Murphy said. Also a 2001 film.
On The Edge (2001)
Rarely mentioned when people talk of Murphy or of director John Carney, this decent drama concerns a suicidal young man’s experiences in a Dublin psychiatric hospital. Carney and Murphy also worked together on the first (apparently lost) version of the director’s sci-fi comedy Zonad.
28 Days Later (2002)
Here’s where the international film career really kicks off. Murphy plays a young man who wakes from a coma to discover the world infected by a virus that sends humankind deranged. This writer’s contender for Danny Boyle’s best film.
Batman Begins (2005)
Murphy has largely stayed away from franchise hell, but he makes an exception for his regular collaborator Christopher Nolan. The relationship began with his turn as the deranged Scarecrow in the director’s first visit to Gotham. “I wanted to avoid the Worzel Gummidge look,” Murphy wisely remarked.
Breakfast On Pluto (2005)
Slightly tricky casting now. Murphy demonstrates his range by playing a witty transgender foundling in Neil Jordan’s characteristically colourful take on a characteristically antic novel by Pat McCabe.
The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006)
The first Irish film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The first of Ken Loach’s two triumphs at the event. Murphy is strong as an IRA volunteer in a movie that is as much about later betrayals of the revolution as it is about British tyranny.
Hippie Hippie Shake (2010?)
A mischievous inclusion. Beeban Kidron’s examination of the Oz obscenity trial in early 1970s London – featuring Murphy as Oz editor Richard Neville – deserves note here as one of the most mysteriously unreleased films ever completed. The reasons for its non-emergence remain undisclosed.
Peaky Blinders (2013-2022)
For a large portion of the world, Cillian Murphy remains “the bloke out of Peaky Blinders”. Set in Birmingham during the early part of the last century, the sprawling crime drama developed into a popular epic and made Murphy’s Tommy Selby an equivocal anti-hero.
A Quiet Place Part II (2021)
Murphy was one of the stars entrusted with responsibility for opening cinemas again after the pandemic when he appeared as a reclusive survivor in this fine sequel to the 2018 horror. “People kept sending me degraded pictures of myself on the side of empty buses,” he said, noting how publicity for the film’s first release date hung around after the virus hit.
Oppenheimer (2023)
Who knew that a Christopher Nolan film about the birth of the atomic bomb would get so tied up with a study of Barbie? Murphy is surely in the race for an academy award as his portrayal of the eccentric J Robert Oppenheimer arrives simultaneously with Greta Gerwig’s dolly flick. It’s Barbenheimer time.
