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Cillian Murphy and Christopher Nolan are marking their sixth collaboration with Oppenheimer, the biographical epic about the titular complicated and brilliant physicist tasked with leading the Manhattan Project, the secret effort to create the atom bomb, and the moral and political struggles that followed. This is the first time Murphy, who plays Oppenheimer, is essaying a lead role for Nolan – “Finally!”, as he enthuses with a wink below.
The first reactions to the film have hailed it as a triumph for Nolan and Murphy; the latter having last year completed a decade-long arc as Tommy Shelby in lauded period gangster drama Peaky Blinders. In Oppenheimer, Murphy “captures all the contradictions of this brilliant, tortured, complicated man,” wrote Deadline’s Pete Hammond in his review which also called this “the most important motion picture of 2023, and maybe far beyond.”
Oppenheimer the man, as the film that’s based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin tells it, struggled with psychological issues in his youth and grew to become a peerless intellectual though not an entirely likeable presence – he womanized and could appear arrogant and aloof. After the war, he was a vocal opponent of nuclear armament and stripped of his security clearance during a 1954 hearing that focused on his maybe/maybe-not communist ties. The film presents the audience with philosophical quandaries aplenty. Murphy as Oppenheimer quotes the Bhagavad Gita after the Trinity test of the bomb: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
I caught up with Murphy on two recent occasions to discuss the film, his role as the contradictory scientist and much more. The interviews, which took place before the SAG-AFTRA strike was called, have been combined, condensed and edited for clarity in the Q&A below.
Oppenheimer also features a large and starry cast that includes Robert Downey Jr, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Jason Clarke, Kenneth Branagh and an unrecognizable Gary Oldman along with a host of others. Universal began overseas rollout on July 19 with North American previews beginning today.
DEADLINE: The last time you and I spoke was about a year ago when you were just a couple of weeks out of filming Oppenheimer…
CILLIAN MURPHY: (Laughs) I must have been in a heap.
DEADLINE: How long does it take to shed the figurative weight of this sort of character afterwards?
MURPHY: It’s like anything. If you do anything to a high standard and spend an awful lot of time at it, you’re working 16-, 17-, 18-hour days incredibly focused. So then when you stop, it’s very abrupt and you have an awful lot of displaced energy. It takes a while to figure that out. There is a little period where you’re neither one nor the other, you’re not a civilian, you’re still not the character, you’re floating around – but it’s not particularly dramatic it’s just trying to readjust to daily life.
DEADLINE: When Chris first talked to you about the project, did he offer any insight into what he was setting out to do? What did he say to you when he first proposed it to you?
MURPHY: In typical Chris fashion, there was no pre-amble or no sense that he might have been writing something. He just called me out of the blue and he said, in his very understated British way, that he’s making this film about Oppenheimer and he’d like me to play Oppenheimer. So that was a tremendous shock, a very pleasant one, but a shock nonetheless.
I didn’t know that much about Oppenheimer, I had kind of like Wikipedia-level knowledge about him at the time, and then Chris said it’s based off of this book.
He was in LA and I was in Dublin and it was still Covid times. I couldn’t get out of Ireland, so he came to Dublin and he gave me the script and I sat in his hotel room and read it and realized it was something special. It genuinely was one of the best screenplays I’d ever read, and it was written in the first person which is not something I’d ever experienced before, so that was terrifying.
DEADLINE: I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense, but the film was like a history lesson that only made me want to learn more. He’s not the most likeable person, but then it’s fascinating to watch the build-up and it’s like a left turn in the third act with the security hearing and the adversarial relationship with Robert Downey Jr’s character Lewis Strauss. I felt like it had echoes of a redemption story, but with so many contradictions. In terms of working on it with Chris, how important was it to shed light on, as the book is subtitled, Oppenheimer’s “triumph and tragedy”?
MURPHY: It’s interesting that you use the word redemption. The bit you mentioned, the hearing at the end, that to me feels like the most Promethean part of the movie, or the most Faustian – he made a pact and then he tried to renegotiate the pact. Did you feel it was redemptive in the end?
DEADLINE: To a degree – with regard to Strauss and with him receiving the Enrico Fermi Award that was conferred by John F Kennedy years later.
MURPHY: And also you know that the American government reinstated his security clearance, I think it was just a few months ago; it really didn’t get much headlines that story, but that was quite interesting that that happened within the year when the movie was coming out.
DEADLINE: I wonder if there’s any correlation to that…
MURPHY: Maybe they were getting ahead of it. I don’t know, but it’s good that it happened, but it was a little under the radar.
DEADLINE: Let’s talk more about the Promethean angle.
MURPHY: It’s brilliant for drama, isn’t it? Like I mentioned the Faust thing… When I was researching it and Chris and I were talking – cause he gave me the script in September of 21 and we didn’t shoot until February 22, so I had six months – it’s in the book that Oppenheimer was obsessed with this Henry James novella called Beast in the Jungle and this idea that there was something stalking him all his life and that eventually it would come after him and get him.
Maybe that’s the state of mind of all great human beings: that with all the success and fame and notoriety there will be something there that will take you down. It’s not a very good novel, it’s not one of James’ best, but it’s very interesting. All the time, Oppenheimer sensed that this was all gonna come crashing down and they were going to come for him. It’s really interesting to have that in your psychology all the while.
DEADLINE: You’ve had a long time collaboration with Chris and this is the first time that he put you in a leading role…
MURPHY: (Laughs) Finally!
DEADLINE: Are there particular challenges associated with that? Do you feel a lot of extra pressure?
MURPHY: Yeah, but I’ve always chased down roles that I feel pressure. I have no interest in doing something that is safe or easy where you can kind of cruise in. So the jobs that I love are the terrifying ones that do put you under a lot of pressure, that do give you a lot of responsibility – and this was a huge one.
I’d always secretly wanted to play a lead for Chris. I think any actor in the whole world would want to be in a Chris Nolan movie, not to mind play a lead for him, and we have such a long relationship. I mean, it’s 20 years.
It was 2003 that I first met him, so (laughs) it makes us old – it’s a long time.
He’s not the sort of person that would call me up and talk and shoot the shit. He’s just working and it just felt right this one – and maybe there was some sort of physical resemblance, I don’t know. People seem to think there was, but he just seemed to think that the time was right.
DEADLINE: Maybe this time was different because you were so deeply involved, but how do you work together?
MURPHY: My personal way of working is to do an awful lot of research and prep and then sort of abandon it when you come to actually acting in the scene with other actors because then it becomes about instinct. For me, acting is not intellectual, it’s instinctual. But it’s always really useful to have all of the research, it’s your kind of due diligence to do that.
With Chris, I think trust is the main thing. He expects excellence from everybody – from every single crew member, from every single actor – and so people know that and they come fully prepared and then in terms of the work he kind of lets you off.
He really loves actors and he lets you off to explore choices in the scene, and then maybe after a few takes he comes in and he gives these incredibly unbelievably precise and succinct and kind of laser-like notes which can completely flip your performance. But it is just about trust really. I feel very safe, you feel very cared for.
And also his sets, even though they’re huge blockbuster movies, it feels very private when you’re making them cause there’s only one camera, there’s the boom op and there’s Chris right next to the camera. There’s no video village, there’s none of that, so it does feel like this kind of laboratory that you’re making work in and you can make a fool of yourself and try something that mightn’t work. I think the reason that his films succeed on such a massive scale is that he puts performance first.
DEADLINE: I recall one of the times I visited the Peaky Blinders set and you were filming a scene which required several takes. I was standing like four feet from you between set-ups and you leaned over and whispered, “How are your donkey and sheep?” and then you went straight back into being Tommy. It was very kind of you, but I was surprised because it was so intense on set; are you able to dip in and dip out like that? Or was that just a weird day?
MURPHY: (Laughs) No, I always like to have a light atmosphere on set, you know particularly if we’re doing work where you have to go deep and into kind of darker places. I always like to have it easy because you need to feel relaxed to make great work, certainly I do.
But, you know, it affects you completely. If you do anything intensely for 17, 18 hours a day like we were working on Oppenheimer – it was an incredibly fast shoot, it was like 57 days we shot the whole thing – if you do anything that intensely for that length of time a day, it’s gonna affect you. And then also I had to get really skinny for it so I wasn’t really eating, so you get to this very sort of hysterically lucid state of mind, but it’s an amazing feeling – you feel completely immersed in it and completely focused in it.
Chris moves at a really fast pace, there’s no one standing around kind of shooting the shit or talking. When you come on the set at 7 and you wrap at whatever time, it’s constant work – there’s no waiting around cause Chris knows exactly what he wants and he moves at an incredibly fast pace so he expects everyone else to move at that pace, but you feel wonderfully exhausted at the end of it.
DEADLINE: What did the physical prep entail? Did you get hangry?
MURPHY: (Laughs) Probably, I don’t know. Like I said, I try to keep it light. It’s important to have a light atmosphere on set and to get on with people cause that’s where I think good work comes from. But, if you reduce your calorific intake after a while your body just gets used to it; you stop feeling hungry – I wouldn’t recommend it, but that’s what happens.
It’s not a big deal really, you just kind of eat less. I had a nutritionist and all that, but what was important was to get the silhouette. He had a very distinct silhouette, you know? And it was very self-conscious, self-mythologizing. So, in order for that silhouette to work, I had to be a certain physical shape, but that’s just another trick in your arsenal and a lot of it we could accentuate with costuming and the way the suits were tailored.
DEADLINE: On Peaky Blinders your mother, who’s a French teacher, helped you out with the French you needed for the final season. Here, Oppenheimer at one point surprises everyone by launching into what sounded like perfect Dutch. How did you work on that?
MURPHY: I remember saying to Chris, ‘So there’s this scene with a Dutch sequence in the script, how are we going to do that?’ And he said, ‘You mean how are you going to do that.’ And I went ‘Okay…’ I asked (DP) Hoyte van Hoytema, who’s Dutch, to record it, and he recorded it and then I slowed it down so I just learned it phonetically over three months – I can still remember it.
DEADLINE: Do you actually know what you said?
MURPHY: (Laughs) It was something about atoms… No, I do remember. I had a vague conceptual grasp on all the science of the movie, but there’s no point in wasting time on that stuff because you can’t in six months even begin to have a grasp on quantum mechanics. My job was to go after the humanity. So that stuff becomes mechanical.
It’s like writing all the equations, it becomes like hieroglyphics and there’s something very soothing about writing those equations. I was talking to Matt Damon about it as well, he did it in Good Will Hunting, and you just learn them and forget what they mean, but it’s very satisfying to write them.
DEADLINE: Talking about the humanity, what is it actors say about not having to like the character…
MURPHY: You have to have some empathy I think. What was pretty clear with Oppenheimer, there was no judgement. It was really interesting, for me one of the ways in was the intellect, and I firmly believe – a lot of his contemporaries would argue that he was the most brilliant of all of those men of that generation, those scientists — I believe it’s actually a burden not a gift to be that brilliant. So that was a way in for me, and then also it’s pretty clear that when he was a kid he struggled a lot emotionally, psychologically and you can see that in the movie, there’s a lot of that in all the texts about him.
I think he was forming himself in his 20s and 30s, self-consciously doing that. Then the relationship with Kitty (Oppenheimer’s wife played by Blunt) is very interesting. You know they say that you never really know what makes a relationship, but that relationship sustained. There was some interdependence there that was key to both of their lives, they needed each other; it was highly dysfunctional but it sustained.
DEADLINE: What do you think about the timeliness of the movie? There’s stuff in there that makes one think about climate change and then the whole warning that this will keep escalating… What parallels do you see?
MURPHY: I’m always very careful about giving messages with work because I don’t think that’s the job of the movie – the job of the movie is to ask the question not to give the answers. I think it’s clear for anyone who’s interested in geopolitics, what’s happening in the world today – the movie is scarily kind of relevant and just as we began shooting, Russia invaded Ukraine and there was all this nuclear sabre rattling which is still continuing.
But, yeah, I think it should provoke. I think it’s a very provocative film. What happened in ’45 changed history, changed the world. We’re all living in a nuclear age now. Whether you decide to think about it or not, it’s there and I think this film is very entertaining and very stimulating, but it should exercise people if they so wish to go out and read about it and to educate themselves and to actually know about that, the threat that we live under continuously.
DEADLINE: This cast is so jammed with incredible talent, can you talk about working with all these different actors?
MURPHY: It was ridiculous. Like I said, we work so fast and I was so in it and I was on every single day, just like this train that had left the station and there was no getting off and we were going at such a pace and I was so consumed by the whole thing. But you’d look at the call sheet and go ‘Oh fuck, tomorrow it’s a scene with Ken Branagh’ or ‘Tomorrow it’s a scene with Gary Oldman’ or ‘We’ve got a big huge scene with Downey’ and it was kind of every actor’s dream to be able to work… There’s no resting, you’re just pushing yourself all the time trying to match these incredible actors. What I love about Chris, I think he always casts movies immaculately.
Now on this you could say ‘Oh, there’s just a bunch of movie stars.’ But the fact is, they’re all playing people of consequence, like every single one of them is a very consequential person. So, to have a big movie star in there makes total total sense, but everybody mucked in.
On Chris’ sets there’s no individual trailers, there’s no individual make-up, everything is just very old school and it think everyone was delighted to be back, it felt like independent movie making on a huge scale.
But the day with Gary for example, that was just a gift; it was just a total gift and we tried it loads of different ways. We had a whole day to do it and obviously he knows Chris from before and I’d worked with him briefly on one of the Batman movies and I’m a huge fan, but when you get in a room with all of these big movie stars, ultimately it just comes down to people who are at work trying to do the best they can. Every single one of them was incredibly generous and focused and there for Chris. I think it also shows the amount of respect Chris has in the business, everyone wants to turn up to do the movie, whatever size the part – it was a blast.
DEADLINE: You’ve spoken a bit about Oppenheimer’s naiveté, can you elaborate on that?
MURPHY: I thought it was naive of him to think that you could create this genocidal weapon and think that it would end all wars or that governments and countries would work together to restrict nuclear armament or proliferation and I think we all see now that was incredibly naive, but that’s what makes him so fascinating – that he could be this brilliant and then feel that way about this creation. It’s just part of his personality in general – he was so complicated in his relationship with people, they were very, very tricky – he was so kind of contradictory, that’s the word that keeps coming up.
DEADLINE: The hearing scenes with Jason Clarke as the prosecutor were so intense – I’ve met Jason a number of times and like him, but I really kind of wanted to punch his character…
MURPHY: (Laughs) Well that was my favorite part of making the film cause that came right at the end and we shot that in like two or three weeks but it was very intense and we were in this tiny, tiny little room – it was not a set, it was this outrageously tiny bureaucratic shitty place somewhere in LA and you have this huge IMAX camera and all these brilliant actors and it felt a little bit to me like the old days, like making theater. There was this troupe of actors that would come in every day and we’d really just go at it. I remember those particular scenes with Jason – particularly the last sort of cross examination that he grills Oppenheimer with at the end – and Chris was just pushing us and pushing us and pushing us and that’s the stuff that I love – you know those big, meaty, meaty scenes.
DEADLINE: Emily and Matt recently mentioned that you didn’t join the cast for dinners when shooting the Los Alamos scenes. Was that an effort to just stay in the zone?
MURPHY: I’ve talked to all of those guys about this, when you get one of those huge roles of a lifetime – which this felt like it was one of those for me – you become consumed by it, it takes up all of your waking time and it’s all you think about. You’re just preparing all the time. I just didn’t really have room for it in my head, for having a crack and having fun. Yeah, I was trying to skip meals and reduce calorie intake, but it was just a decision. It’s not that I’m an unsociable person, I loved hanging out with these guys now on the tour, we’re great pals. It’s just focus – you just want to focus on the work. And sleep becomes vitally important cause you’re working every single day and you’re up before dawn, you just want to get as much sleep as possible.
DEADLINE: In the final scenes when Oppenheimer is older, did that make you wonder if that’s what you’ll look like?
MURPHY: I guess so, there’s a little preview for my wife. It’s amazing what it does to the actor because it’s like a mask and that’s what actors do, right? But when you actually put on the physical mask it’s incredible, and the work of those prosthetic artists is so detailed it’s staggering. I wouldn’t like to do a job every day which involved hours and hours in the chair – that was five or six hours for two days – but I salute their work because it’s extraordinary.
DEADLINE: The reactions have been great, and you’ve been racing about between Paris and London, what are you taking away from the response?
MURPHY: The response has been insanely good and we’re so proud of it. We were at the premiere in Paris and after the movie finished all the audience stayed there talking. It was amazing, they just stayed and were talking because it does that, it has that effect on people. That’s what I’m excited about cause it’s made for the audience and I think they really get something out of it.
My 15-year-old son saw it and I know a lot of kids want to see it which is great; I think there’s going to be a lot of discussion about this movie when the world can finally see it.
DEADLINE: You’re not super fond of promoting yourself; you don’t do that many interviews…
MURPHY: (Laughs) I’m getting better at it, Nancy, c’mon!
DEADLINE: I know, and I’m grateful that you always make time for me, but you haven’t been on this sort of tour before with you front and center. In an interview we did a little while back, you referred to yourself as a kind of ‘weirdo hermit’ so I wonder how the promotion has been for you and being out amongst so many people…
MURPHY: Here’s the thing, I like talking about work and promoting work that I’m really proud of. The distinction I make is that I’m not so comfortable being a personality or just talking about myself or being analyzed by people, that isn’t my favorite thing. But I adore talking about this film because I think it’s incredibly special and I really want to get people to go see it in the cinema cause I think they’ll have a really excellent experience.
DEADLINE: You physically live far away from the industry – what does that do for you in terms of your work and making choices?
MURPHY: We did live in London for 14 years, it was a big chunk of my life from my mid 20s to my late 30s. I really enjoyed it, it was really exciting, it’s a great city, but the move to Dublin wasn’t motivated by wanting to distance myself from the industry. I was purely motivated by wanting to come home to Ireland and raise our kids as Irish and be near our families.
I think the world we live in now, you’re proof of it as well, you can do your work remotely and the work will come to you. I don’t believe that you have to live in Los Angeles or New York or London to make good work; it means you have to travel a little more, but it hasn’t affected my work or professional life in any way. It just means that when I stop working, I’m not surrounded by it and that to me is healthy.
DEADLINE: I imagine at home people are just used to seeing you walking the dog or whatever, but when you get recognized by a fan, what do they talk about the most?
MURPHY: Oh, Peaky Blinders, inevitably. Which is great. The show is a kind of global phenomenon and we never expected it; I mean you know how it grew, you were there, you saw it. I feel really proud of it and that’s the thing about television, it’s continually growing an audience and people are rewatching it. I mean, it’s kind of staggering how popular the thing is still.
DEADLINE: What did you think about footage of you as Tommy being used in a video posted by the Ron De Santis campaign?
MURPHY: Well, Steve (Knight, Peaky Blinders creator) texted me and said, ‘We’ve got to put out a statement.’ I thought it was a very well written statement. We just don’t want to be associated with that sort of awful rhetoric.
DEADLINE: Conversely, there’s a scene in season three of Ted Lasso that uses the Peaky theme song “Red Right Hand” in what seems to be a complete hat tip to you guys.
MURPHY: That’s the weird thing, you know?, people have Peaky Blinders weddings, people have Peaky Blinders tattoos. I still haven’t figured it out – it’s still kind of bizarre to me, but it’s wonderful. It means that we did something good.
DEADLINE: Are there people you meet that make you geek out?
MURPHY: Musicians, yeah, I do, cause I’m a frustrated musician, you know, and I rarely get to meet them, but I’m still in awe of them and what they do.
DEADLINE: And you’re still never going to release any of the music you’ve done?
MURPHY: (Laughs), No, no way.
DEADLINE: What’s the status of the film you’re producing and starring in, Small Things Like These?
MURPHY: We wrapped that in March; we’re just cutting it, we’re in that post-production stage. I’m really happy with it, it was a great experience. It was kind of weirdly related to Oppenheimer because I met Matt on Oppenheimer and they were just setting up Artists Equity and I pitched him the story of the film. So that was the lovely kind of bit of serendipity on that movie. I really admire the philosophy of that company which is artists-led. I’m really proud of it, so hopefully it’ll be I guess next year at this stage.
DEADLINE: You’ve said in past you like to take maybe six months off between projects…
MURPHY: Yeah, that’s kind of ideal. I mean, I love not working, and I also feel that, you know, people talk about research, I think the best research is just being a normal human being and citizen – that’s how you learn about life. All actors are like emotional detectives, so it’s like, I just love looking at people and observing people and just being in the world and I think that’s how you properly research.
DEADLINE: I imagine you’ll work with Chris again, but now that you’ve done a lead for him, would you go back to playing ‘shivering solider’?
MURPHY: Sure, like I’ve said it from the beginning, I’ll always turn up for Chris. I’m such a fan of his movies, I was a fan of his movies before I ever met him – they’re the sort of movies that I love watching – so it’s been a privilege to get to work with him six times. I’ll turn up for anything Chris wants me to do, I’m there.
DEADLINE: You’ve told me before that it’s the writing that attracts you to a project. Oppenheimer is in part about a legacy left behind – and a devastating one at that. Do you ever think about your own legacy in terms of the choices you make?
MURPHY: I think it’s a little dangerous to start thinking about legacies. My career has always been incredibly haphazard and incredibly arbitrary, incredibly unplanned. The one constant that you mentioned is the writing. I think since I was a kid I’ve loved story, and I’m still a big reader and I love watching movies, and good stories are my kind of North Star. That’s what I follow. The budget or the medium is secondary to the story always.