Cillian Murphy has been a staple of Christopher Nolan’s movies for quite some time. Little did the Peaky Blinders actor know that after his fifth venture with Nolan, the director would approach him for the lead role in his weightiest subject yet. I previously covered the reasons why Nolan cast Murphy for the title role so I won’t delve into those again. Instead, the focus of this piece is on what made Murphy sign on the dotted line, his inhibitions and thoughts around playing the Manhattan Project physicist, and the impact it had on him.
All of this comes through Empire Magazine’s exclusive feature on the movie. Murphy first read the script in his home in Dublin, Ireland, where Nolan flew to discuss the opportunity with him. He was immediately drawn to the challenge of portraying such a complex, paradoxical figure. The prospect of nailing him on camera seemed like an insurmountable provocation, and it’s that prospect that enthralled Murphy and convinced him to take the leap.
[It was] terrifying and exciting in equal measure. Which I think is the best place to be as an actor starting off on a project. You can’t sit back and think, ‘I’ve got this, this is going to be a piece of piss, I hope the catering is good.’ This was like, ‘Fuck.’ But then it started, this hunger. I could feel this hunger for the character and for the job.
Originally, Murphy had admitted that he wasn’t as aware of Oppenheimer apart from a perfunctory Wikipedia-esque knowhow of his role in creating the first atomic bomb and spurring the nuclear age. Just like everyone else though, Murphy too read Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus, which became for him, a window into Oppenheimer’s life. Elaborating then on some facets of Oppie’s character that added layers to his personality and made him such a fascinating figure to portray, here’s what Murphy had to say:
He is this iconic figure, the father of the atomic bomb, the man who stole the fire from the gods. He’s a divisive character, and he’s a very hard, complex character to figure out, kind of unknowable. So that is different than playing a cop who’s got scruples in a TV show. Not that those aren’t worthy things to make. But this has an added layer to it.
Making a film this heavy can take an emotional toll on the actors and director. Ask Francis Ford Coppola who swore off making films for a while after directing Apocalypse Now. Murphy seems to have soaked in the tension that this film offered, and the subject matter appears to have stayed with him long after the film wound up principal photography.
I do think about it an awful lot. It brought home to me just what these guys were doing, and how the world would never be the same again. It has definitely stayed with me. It really has stayed with me. I’m a pretty positive, optimistic person, generally, and in the work environment, it doesn’t help anybody to be going around with your knapsack of doom.
He delved on it a bit too much for his own liking, before acknowledging the enormity of the task that these men had at hand. After all, if that’s the toll it takes when playing the man, one can only imagine what the man himself must have gone through on the field. Murphy was accepting of this, and mused a bit more about the trappings of his situation.
I don’t know if it’s healthy to walk around thinking about it all the time. I certainly don’t know if I have the intellectual or emotional capacity for that. But maybe these men did. Many people spoke about Oppenheimer as being the most brilliant of them all. I think that intellect… that becomes a burden because it’s like you have access to a different dimension in your thinking. And if you’re in that dimension all the time, that must be really hard on your personal life.
While we’ve seen little of Cillian Murphy’s performance in the trailers for Oppenheimer, it seems like it carries the potential to turn out to be every bit as nuanced, thoughtful and introspective as Christopher Nolan wanted it to be, when he first placed the burden of playing Oppie on his lead man. We’ll find out soon enough.
Oppenheimer hits theaters on July 21, 2023. For more of my coverage on the movie, click on the title tag below.
