[On 18 February 2024, Irish actor Cillian (pronounced KILL-ee-ən) Murphy (b. 1976) was interviewed on the CBS News magazine show 60 Minutes by correspondent Scott Pelley. Murphy’s been nominated for a 2024 Best Actor Academy Award (winners to be revealed on 10 March); he’s already won the Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Screen Actors Guild Awards.
[Here’s IMDb’s biography of Murphy, who got his start as an actor on stage in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs by the Corcadorca Theatre Company in Cork, Republic of Ireland, premièring on 26 September 1996 (I’ve changed the names of plays and movies, and other titles to roman type for easier recognition):
Striking Irish actor Cillian Murphy was born in Douglas [County Cork], the oldest child of Brendan Murphy, who works for the Irish Department of Education, and a mother who is a teacher of French. He has three younger siblings. Murphy was educated at Presentation Brothers College, Cork. He went on to study law at University College Cork, but dropped out after about a year. During this time, Murphy also pursued an interest in music, playing guitar in various bands. Upon leaving University, Murphy joined the Corcadorca Theater Company in Cork, and played the lead role in Disco Pigs, amongst other plays.
Various film roles followed, including a film adaptation of Disco Pigs (2001). However, his big film break came when he was cast in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), which became a surprise international hit. This performance earned him nominations for Best Newcomer at the Empire Awards and Breakthrough Male Performance at the MTV Movie Awards.
Murphy went on to supporting roles in high-profile films such as Cold Mountain (2003) and Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), and then was cast in two villain roles: Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka The Scarecrow, in Batman Begins (2005) and Jackson Rippner in Red Eye (2005). Although slight in nature for a villain, Murphy’s piercing blue eyes helped to create creepy performances and critics began to take notice. Manhola Dargis of the New York Times cited Murphy as a “picture-perfect villain”, while David Denby of The New Yorker noted he was both “seductive” and “sinister”.
Later that year, Murphy starred as Patrick “Kitten” Braden, an Irish transgender woman in search of her mother in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005), a film adaptation of the Pat McCabe novel. Although the film was not a box office success, Murphy was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical and he won Best Actor for the Irish Film and Television Academy Awards.
The following year, Murphy starred in Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006). The film was the most successful independent Irish film and won the Palm[e] [d]’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Murphy continued to take roles in a number of independent films, and also reprised his role as the Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008). Nolan is known for working with actors in multiple films, and cast Murphy in Inception (2010) as Robert Fischer, the young heir of the multi-billion dollar empire, who was the target of DiCaprio’s dream team. His most well-known work is starring as Thomas Shelby in the British TV show Peaky Blinders beginning in 2013.
Murphy continues to appear in high-profile films such as In Time (2011), Red Lights (2012), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), the final film in Nolan’s Batman trilogy.
Murphy is married [since 2004] to Yvonne McGuinness, an artist. The couple have two sons, Malachy and Aran.
[Much of what Murphy said about acting was interesting to me, even if I didn’t agree with it all, so I decided to repost the write-up of the interview by Pelley and his producing team (Cillian Murphy said yes to "Oppenheimer" before reading one of Christopher Nolan's red scripts - CBS News; a video of the interview is included).]
Cillian Murphy jumped to act in “Oppenheimer,” even before reading writer and director Christopher Nolan’s script.
The decision paid off. Murphy won a Golden Globe for the role and he’s nominated for an Oscar for the first time in his decades-long career. There have been six Nolan films for Murphy.
“It’s always paid off for me, you know, in every film that I worked with him on,” Murphy said.
Working on “Oppenheimer”
Murphy did eventually read the script from Nolan, printed on red paper so that it couldn’t be photocopied.
“I did genuinely think it’s one of the greatest screenplays I’d ever read,” he said.
Murphy views it as a miracle when films, including “Oppenheimer,” get made.
“And then if it’s any way good, that’s a miracle. And then if it connects with audiences, that’s a miracle,” he said. “So it’s a miracle, upon miracle, upon miracle to have a film like ‘Oppenheimer.’ It really is.”
That miracle came after months of hard work. Murphy lost 28 pounds so that his silhouette would match that of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, often credited as the father of the atomic bomb. For six months, Murphy read and listened to Oppenheimer’s lectures. He performed for his dog Scout as he walked on the beach.
“I remember at one point, I said to Chris — ‘Chris, there appears to be, he appears to speak Dutch here. And I think he’s giving a lecture in Dutch here. What are we gonna do about that?’ And Chris said, ‘You mean what are you going to do about that,’” Murphy said.
Murphy said he put all he learned in the back of his mind and acted on instinct.
“I think instinct is your most powerful tool that you have as an actor. Nothing must be predetermined,” he said. “So therefore you mustn’t have a plan about how you’re gonna play stuff. And I love that. It’s like being buffeted by the wind and being buffeted by emotion.”
Emily Blunt, who played Oppenheimer’s tortured wife, describes being in a scene with Murphy as a “very visceral” experience. She doesn’t know of many people who can do what he does.
“If you’re as agile as someone like Cillian, and as vulnerable, and as clever, you can play it all,” she said.
Playing it all
While “Oppenheimer” may be the role that made Murphy a household name, he’s been acting for decades, starting in his hometown of Cork, Ireland. Murphy and his brother had a band in high school and performing led him to an acting class and then his first play [presented by the Corcadorca Theatre Company] in the Triskel Arts Centre, which housed a small stage with 100 seats.
He was 20 in 1996 when he acted in his first play, “Disco Pigs.”
“I was very comfortable on stage in front of an audience from when I was little. I never had any nerves doing that,” Murphy said. “It felt natural, you know? And thrilling.”
Some of his earliest audiences were “drunk guys out of their mind bashing up against” a fire escape door. It used to energize him.
“So I remember learning about, like, taking whatever you have — sort of responding to whatever the energy is in the room and using it,” he said.
Today, the former stage is undergoing a transformation so it can be used by aspiring actors. Murphy, who hadn’t been back to the space since 1996, visited it with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.
Since that first play, there have been a dozen others and 40 movies. Murphy’s breakout role as a leading man came with 2013’s “Peaky Blinders” [TV series, 2013-22]. In the series, Murphy plays Thomas Shelby, who survives World War I and goes on to lead a family of gangsters.
“I like to be challenged. And I, and when I read something, I want to go, ‘I don’t really know how I can do that,” Murphy said.
Murphy came into his own during his 10 years acting in “Peaky Blinders.” Early in his career, he heard from “one of the Sydneys,” either Lumet or Pollack — he’s not sure — that it takes 30 years to make an actor.
“It’s not just technique and experience and all that, it’s maturing as a human being and trying to grapple with life and figure it out, and all of that stuff. So by the time you’ve been doing it for 30 years, you have all of that banked, hopefully,” Murphy said. “And eventually, then I think you’ll get to a point where you might be an OK actor.”
What’s next for Murphy
Murphy’s newest movie is “Small Things Like These,” which premiered Thursday at the Berlin International Film Festival. He plays Bill Furlong, tormented by injustice that he sees on his route delivering coal. His wife fears his empathy will upend their lives.
Murphy is joined in the critically acclaimed movie by Eileen Walsh, who’s known Murphy longer than any other actor, having acted with him in “Disco Pigs.” Walsh has seen how much Murphy will put into his roles.
“From the very beginning, our warm-ups for ‘Disco Pigs’ involved us punching each other quite hard,” she said.
Regardless of how far Murphy’s pushing has taken him, he still sees himself as an actor, not a movie star.
“Oh, OK, am I? I think you can be both. You know, I’ve never understood that term, really, ‘movie star,’” he said. “I’ve always just felt like I’m an actor. That’s, I think, a term for other people, rather than for me.”
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“DISCO PIGS”
by Matt Wolf
[Since this post is about acting as much as it’s about Cillian Murphy and Oppenheimer, I thought it would be interesting to see a review of Murphy’s début performance in Disco Pigs on stage. Below is the notice published in Variety on 21 September 1997 of the London première of the play (Bush Theatre, 3-27 September 1997), after its début in Cork and its performances at the Edinburgh Festival (Disco Pigs (variety.com)).]
Language can be both the blessing and the blight of the Irish theater, and in the case of "Disco Pigs," it falls somewhere in between. Written in an invented patois that suggests high-adrenaline baby talk filtered through Ireland's thick Cork accent, Enda Walsh's play marks an impressive linguistic feat that nonetheless reaps diminishing returns. Whereas the novel speech in a play like "The Skriker" [1994 play by Caryl Churchill] induces a real rush, the grunts of "Disco Pigs" wear out their not always intelligible welcome: For a 70-minute piece, it's a fairly long sit. The play was a hit at the recent Edinburgh Festival [7-30 August 1997], and one can see why, since it possesses the virtues on which that festival thrives: youth, energy and speed. But seen in London amid a season that has hosted a virtual flood of Irish drama, the play looks like a belated addition to the New Brutalism in vogue at the moment.
[Brutalism (more commonly an architectural style) in literature and drama is characterized by raw, unadorned, and often unsettling or violent themes and imagery. It may be a tactic to reflect the harsh realities of the world, such as poverty, violence, and social injustice as a way to give voice to the marginalized and oppressed. It can be seen as a way to challenge societal norms and conventions or to explore the darker aspects of human nature, such as violence, addiction, and mental illness. “New Brutalism” in literature and drama arose around the 1980s. Some examples of New Brutalist plays are: One Flea Spare (1995) by Naomi Wallace, Shopping and Fucking (1996) by Mark Ravenhill, and Bloody Sunday (2005) by Richard Norton-Taylor.]
Runt (Eileen Walsh) and Pig (Cillian Murphy) — teenagers both — lead abusive, anti-social lives, yearning for sex and chips and booze (not always in that order) and ready to fly into a tantrum (and worse) when plans go awry. The two define one another’s existence and speak of themselves as a Celtic Bonnie and Clyde, weaned on “Baywatch” and “Never Can Say Goodbye” and yearning for the true release that their dreary circumstances won’t allow.
On a set by Aedin Cosgrove that suggests a low-rent arena of sorts (two red metal chairs are the only props), gawky Runt plays realist to the feisty, mercurial Pig.
Director Pat Kiernan rightly treats the piece as an in-your-face mood swing shifting between ferocity and elegy, and he exhibits a real find in Eileen Walsh’s (no relation to the playwright) awkward, cropped-haired Runt. As the most pugnacious of soulmates, Murphy has the less engaging role, though it’s a tribute to both actors that their body language tells its own compelling story long after the author’s own talking-in-tongues has begun to pall.
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“‘OPPENHEIMER’: CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S STARRY
[On the other hand . . . .
[Scott Pelley’s interview is about Oppenheimer, so here’s a review of the film. It’s David Fear’s column from Rolling Stone on 19 June 2023 ('Oppenheimer' Review: Christopher Nolan Epic Falls Short of Greatness (rollingstone.com))—just one of dozens that covered this Oscar-nominated hit of the past season.
[Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s biographical thriller film that chronicles the career of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), focusing on his direction of the Manhattan Project during World War II, which developed the atom bomb. Nolan wrote, directed, and co-produced the film for Universal Pictures, Atlas Entertainment, and Syncopy. The studios released the movie on 13 July 2023 in the United Kingdom and 17 July in the United States.
[Oppenheimer is the fifth highest-grossing movie worldwide that runs three hours or longer, after Avengers: Endgame (2019), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Titanic (1997), and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). It’s Nolan’s highest-grossing non-Batman film, and his third highest-grossing overall, after The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
[In September 2023, Oppenheimer became the highest-grossing biographical film of all time, surpassing Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). It is the second-highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, behind Joker (2019) and the highest-grossing World War II-related film, surpassing Dunkirk (2017), also a Nolan film.
[Wikipedia reports that the film received critical acclaim, primarily for its direction, cast performances (particularly from Murphy, Blunt, and Downey), and visuals; it was frequently ranked as one of Nolan's best films. On Rotten Tomatoes, 93% of 496 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.6/10. Metacritic assigned the film a score of 90 out of 100.
[Oppenheimer, also according to Wikipedia, was praised by other filmmakers as well. Oliver Stone deemed the film “a classic, which I never believed could be made in this climate.” Paul Schrader called Oppenheimer, “the best, most important film of this century,” while Denis Villeneuve called it “a masterpiece.”
[The film has received 13 nominations (including Murphy’s Best Actor nod) for the 96th Academy Awards to become Nolan’s most Oscar-nominated film, surpassing the eight nominations achieved by The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), and Dunkirk (2017).]
Inception filmmaker’s extensive, exhaustive portrait of the “father of the atomic bomb” is both thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and not enough
In the beginning, there were simply explosions. Smaller bangs — the big one would come much later, in the New Mexico desert. But for J. Robert Oppenheimer, the quantum physicist who would guide the greatest scientific minds of his generation toward creating a doomsday device, it was all just a constant collision and coming apart of matter in his head. Put the man in a lab, and he’s hopeless. Let him roam in the world of theories, and Oppenheimer could hear what a mentor dubbed “the music of science.” Those symphonies gave him visions of black holes, collapsing stars, developing nebulae, gaseous eruptions, particles moving at the speed of light, molecules spinning, atoms splitting. He sees these things, and then we see these things, rendered in 70mm IMAX. Any filmmaker can create a cinematic universe. (Many have. Too many, some might say.) Very few can show you how a genius perceives the building blocks of our universe, right before that same person imagines something that threatens our existence in it.
This is what Christopher Nolan does in Oppenheimer, a biopic on the “father of the atomic bomb,” and in terms of getting you into the mindset of its subject, these bursts of abstract imagery are a brilliant move on his part. It’s not the only ace the writer-director has up his well-tailored sleeve, mind you — there are somewhere between four to five timelines bumping against each other at any given moment, it’s shot in both saturated color and stark black & white, its sound design equally prizes dead silence and deafening booms, and the cast is comprised of seemingly every third actor with a SAG card. Not to mention a depth-charge performance by Cillian Murphy as the Man Who Would Be Destroyer of Worlds, one that allows the tiniest surface ripples to communicate the agony and the ecstasy of changing the world.
But those interspersed shots of cosmic debris and microscopic detonations, some of which abruptly interrupt exchanges and others that smoothly transition viewers from one scene to the next, are perfect examples of how to let you experience someone like Oppenheimer’s perspective by showing, rather than telling. And it sometimes feels like those two camps — the cinematic and the chatty-to-a-fault — are fighting it out on Nolan’s massive canvas in a way that resembles nuclear fission minus the energy release.
Taking its cues from the exhaustive, Pulitzer-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin [2006; Vintage Books; 721 pages], Oppenheimer seeks to cram as much of the man’s life, his work, his elevation to national hero, his eventual persecution, and his personal demons into three hours. Just for good measure, Nolan throws in not one but two competing courtroom dramas as well. There’s a roll-the-dice sensation throughout: Scenes of people sitting in rooms talking can seem thrilling or plodding, clarify historical conflicts and complicated concepts or confuse the hell out of you. Set pieces feel sweeping one second, and like they’re sucking the oxygen out of the room the next. Then, suddenly, the movie cuts to a huge close-up of Murphy, his eyes suggesting a man wrestling for his soul, and you’re transfixed. As with so much of Nolan’s work, you can feel a truly great film peeking out in fits and spurts within a longer, slightly uneven one.
It’s a tough thing to admit, given that Nolan is one of Hollywood’s few name-above-the-title auteurs left standing. He can still get an original mega-budgeted film greenlit, and has taken on the mantle of keeping alive not just film as a medium but film as a physical means of storytelling. His work is intellectual yet visceral, philosophical yet pulse-pounding; he’s always managed to smuggle big ideas into multiplexes via blockbuster templates, even in genres he hasn’t completely terraformed. Like its better half in the joint entity now known as “Barbenheimer,” Oppenheimer isn’t afraid to talk up to an audience (although in Barbie‘s case, the degree of difficulty in doing that via a decades-old brand of dolls feels damn near revolutionary). And along with that shiny happy toy story, Nolan’s biography of a key figure of the 20th century has been burdened with the responsibility of saving motion pictures from financial instability and existential free fall. Heavy are the heads that wear the crown, etc.
So let us now praise movies about famous men, and the famous men who make them. Oppenheimer is most assuredly a Christopher Nolan film, complete with the blessings and the curses of what that phrase entails. The good stuff first: There are a handful of sequences that remind you why this 52-year-old director is considered a godhead by film geeks, genre freaks, and armchair arthouse-cinema scholars alike. When Nolan is on, he is on, as evidenced by the early scenes of Oppenheimer and his military liaison, General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, all mustache and bluster), assembling the eggheads. Their plan is to turn the small New Mexico burg of Los Alamos into a self-sufficient, family-friendly town for a group of scientists and a top-secret think tank for a weapon of mass destruction. The military need the end result of the Manhattan Project to win WWII, preferably before the Germans develop their own version of “the gadget.” Oppenheimer, both compelled by and wary of the opportunity, wants them to maintain the “moral advantage” after the world sees what this thing can do.
Concentrating on the mounting pressure to deliver, the miniature steps forward with each behind-the-scenes breakthrough, and the accountability factor causing friction between the project leader and his patrons, Oppenheimer becomes its own ticking time bomb. All the while, fractures are happening within the team, and the precariousness of the situation, along with Oppenheimer’s willingness to go through with opening this Pandora’s Box, brings things to a tipping point. These scenes remind you of how Nolan understands the use of sound and vision as a means of emotional engagement (helped in no small part by his regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and composer Ludwig Göransson‘s score); how his ability to fold complex ideas into presentations of human behavior, and vice versa, comes through in his writing; how the timing of a cut and the framing of an image can transform a moment from grandiose or mundane to sublime. The gent is a genuine filmmaker. He’s a big-screen artist, the bigger the screens the better.
And these sequences, in particular, reinforce the notion of Nolan as a great director of actors, even if the performances overall are across the board in terms of screen time and effectiveness. Not just Murphy, who’s worked with The Dark Knight director before and delivers an Oppenheimer that goes far beyond the there-goeth-the-great-man clichés associated with many biopics. There’s Damon, whose repartee with Murphy approaches screwball levels. There’s Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who turns a perceived slight into a postwar vendetta against Oppenheimer. (It’s not an exaggeration to say that Downey does some of the best work of his long career here.) There’s Gary Oldman as President Harry S. Truman, who turns a single scene in the Oval Office into a damning portrait of the POTUS as a complete bastard.
There’s Florence Pugh, and Emily Blunt, and Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck, Jason Clarke, Matthew Modine, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich… it’s actually quicker to list who’s not in Oppenheimer. Nolan has said he wanted to cast recognizable faces so that audiences could keep track of who’s who easier, but he also gives them opportunities to flex, whether it’s for a minute or the majority of the running time. And given that there are so many scenes of people conversing, reading, lecturing, interrogating, handwringing and musing over the morality of mass destruction, they have to keep things afloat as much as their ringmaster.
Oppenheimer peaks with the Trinity test, a roughly 10-minute sequence that follows the lead-up to the detonation of the first atomic bomb, its blast, and the sense of shock and awe that greets this game-changing “gadget.” Soon after, we see Oppenheimer addressing his fellow scientists about their victory, and he’s greeted with visions of blinding lights, burnt corpses, and empty bleachers. It’s a climactic gut punch… and there’s still another hour or so to go. Which leads us to the less-than-stellar aspects of Nolan’s A-list A-bomb-creator’s origin story. Threaded in between the race against time to craft this killing machine prototype are recreations of a 1954 tribunal over renewing Oppenheimer’s security clearance, in light of the Soviets now having their own nuclear weapons, and a 1959 congressional hearing on Strauss’s bid to join President Eisenhower’s cabinet. It’s here that we get flashback glimpses of the physicist’s career before Los Alamos, his tenure at UC Berkeley, his marriage to Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer, his attempt to reconcile what he’s unleashed on the world and what turns out to be a contentious relationship with Strauss.
It’s also where the movie starts to waver in terms of storytelling, cutting back and forth to create a tapestry of the 20th century that’s meant to enrich the scenes of science being used and abused in the name of warfare (Nolan’s politics are a moving target in this film, as they are in much of his work, though it’s safe to say he’s solidly anti-nukes here). They end up drawing both the focus and the momentum away from the movie, even if they do flesh some aspects out and give Downey a primo showcase. You suddenly become more aware of Nolan’s tendency to favor giant compositions and conceptual overreaches over connecting narrative dots in certain places, which has been a longstanding criticism. There are some questionable bits of business that play out as well. It’s one thing to let Pugh’s Jean Tatlock, whose Communist affiliation would still haunt J. Robert decades after their torrid affair ended, to be the one who hands him the Sanskrit poem that would be his response to Trinity: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” It’s another to have her do it while she’s writing topless on top of him, which is… a choice. And the less said about her and Murphy getting hot and heavy during an interrogation-session hallucination, the better — we can now say that sex scenes are not Nolan’s forte.
As those two trials intertwine and paint a picture of Oppenheimer as both McCarthy-era martyr and, ultimately, the victor over Strauss’s smear campaign during the movie’s last act, there’s a slight sensation of listening to wind blowing through torn sails. In attempting to get a 360-degree picture of his subject’s life and times on as big a scale as possible, it feels as if Nolan occasionally loses sight of the big picture as a whole. Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens. Nolan has made what can sometimes feel like a maddeningly elusive attempt to make a grand statement about then and now, only to continually drown himself out in the technical equivalent of the Zimmer Honk. He’s also given us one of the only movies of the summer that you really have to see.
