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‘Joy you get only a few times in your life’: Cillian Murphy on Oppenheimer casting
There is a moment in Christopher Nolan’s political thriller Oppenheimer where its titular character – J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist behind the development of the nuclear bomb – begins to transform from scientific hero to political pariah.
At that story juncture it’s hard not to see him as the progenitor of America’s pandemic princeling, former presidential medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci: one moment a saviour, the next almost nailed to a cross as politicians sought to assign blame for an event that it hadn’t come to terms with yet.
“That was a crazy time,” says actor Cillian Murphy, who plays Oppenheimer, “that intersection between science and politics. That was crazy. [The moment Oppenheimer realised] his utility was over. After that, the scientists, certainly in the army, were cut out. That moment in the movie is very telling.”
Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s new film.Credit: Nicky J. Sims/Getty
Oppenheimer is the work of director Nolan, but not quite as you know him. Based on the 2005 biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, this might be Nolan’s most ambitious film. Perhaps his most political. Almost certainly, based on reactions at the first screening in New York, his best.
It boasts an extraordinary A-list ensemble: Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey jnr, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh. It speaks to Nolan’s reputation, and the impact of the film’s script when offered, that actors accustomed to headlining their own films were happy to take on smaller roles just to be a part of it.
Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh attend the Oppenheimer UK Premiere.Credit: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Oppenheimer is a blockbuster, though not in the Batman sense of the word. The film is in both colour and black-and-white. It has few special effects, but the ones it has are practical, not computer-generated, an important footnote when you consider the story takes us to the Los Alamos headquarters of the Manhattan Project, and its world-changing 1945 nuclear test blast.
It is also Nolan’s first script written in the first person; as a storyteller he has always preferred complex, knotted narratives with multiple perspectives. And it is in many ways Nolan’s first romantic story, at least in the sense that Oppenheimer’s complex and passionate relationship with his mistress Jean (Pugh) is a central thread of the story.
Cillian Murphy at the London premiere, before the actors’ strike was called.Credit: Kate Green/Getty Images
“Those scenes were written deliberately,” says Murphy of the film’s sex scenes, which created headlines of their own months before the film’s release. “He knew that those scenes would get the movie the rating that it got. And I think when you see it, it’s so f---ing powerful. And they’re not gratuitous. They’re perfect. And Florence is just amazing.
“I have loved Florence’s work since Lady Macbeth [William Oldroyd’s 2016 period drama about a woman embittered by a loveless marriage] and I think she’s f---ing phenomenal,” Murphy says. “She has this presence as a person and on screen that is staggering. The impact she has [in Oppenheimer] for the size of the role, it’s quite devastating.”
Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Development on the film was announced in September 2021, with Murphy attached from the outset. It had actually begun a few months earlier when Nolan’s wife, producer Emma Thomas, had called Murphy. Even though the pair had collaborated on Nolan’s Dark Knight films (2005-2012), Inception (2010) and Dunkirk (2017), the pair are not particularly close.
“Myself and Chris don’t keep in touch, you know,” Murphy says. “We don’t hang out and go to have pizza. We work together. And then we don’t see each other, and then we work. So, when I got a call from Emma, I knew it must’ve been about something. And then Chris got on the phone, and he said, this is my next project, I’d like you to be my Oppenheimer.”
Cillian Murphy, centre, in a scene from Oppenheimer.
Murphy took the news quite calmly, he recalls. Particularly when compared with other similar, and significant, moments in his career. When he got 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle’s 2002 apocalypse thriller that became his breakthrough role, he was in a queue at London’s Stansted Airport. “I remember jumping up and down in the f---ing queue,” Murphy says, laughing.
And then when Nolan offered him the role of the villain Scarecrow in his Batman trilogy, Murphy was struck deeply by the scale of what lay ahead. “I went, holy shit, this is going to be f---ing big. [I knew] this is a lot of work. So immediately then it turned from kind of joy into focus.”
When Nolan offered him Oppenheimer, his visible enthusiasm was tempered by maturity, but no less engulfing. “I had to f---ing sit down,” Murphy says. “But it was one of those great, glorious, pure moments of the kind of joy that you get only a few times in your life.”
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, left, and Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer.Credit: AP
Critically, Nolan did not want a biographical stitch-up of Oppenheimer, nor did he want the film to rehabilitate Oppenheimer’s complex reputation and legacy. This is, after all, the “father of the atomic bomb”, whose research created Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the Second World War. In the final accounting, those two events claimed almost a quarter of a million lives.
“There isn’t any simple answer to that,” Murphy says when I explain the film’s handling of Oppenheimer had left me conflicted. “And I love it when the film does exactly what it did to you; it provoked you and made you think about Oppenheimer in different ways. That’s what we want to do. We’re not making a documentary, it’s a fictional account. I don’t think it’s meant to give any answers. I think it’s meant to ask questions.”
Murphy was born in Douglas, County Cork, Ireland in 1976. After flirting with both acting and performing in a band, he made his professional debut as an actor in 1996 playing a volatile teenager in Enda Walsh’s critically acclaimed play Disco Pigs. Walsh described him as “enigmatic”. The play made it to Australia two years later, but alas Murphy did not; he had left the production by then.
Cillian Murphy as physicist Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from Oppenheimer, left, and the real Oppenheimer on the test ground for the atomic bomb in 1945.Credit: AP
The younger man in Disco Pigs and the 47-year-old man who walks confidently into a New York hotel room, a week before strikes shutter Hollywood, are not the same men. Yet Murphy still retains the enigmatic aura Walsh spoke of. The same quality casting director Gail Stevens saw when, several years later, she put him in line for the lead role in 28 Days Later.
“I always say this: when I was starting out, a director said it takes 30 years to make an actor,” Murphy says. “I’ve been doing it since I was 20, so that’s 27 years doing it, and I think it’s about right, that estimation. I’m not quite there yet. But I think it does take that long to figure it out. And I’m still figuring it out.
“Some of my instincts are the same as they were when I was a kid, but I’ve kind of refined them,” Murphy adds. “One of the most important things for me, and it changed me profoundly when I worked with Ken Loach [on 2006’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley], was that I realised it is pointless spending all the time in your head. It’s pointless intellectualising work.
Cillian Murphy in a scene from Oppenheimer.Credit: AP
“You can do all the research, and I did for Oppenheimer, I did six months of research, but when it comes down it, it’s just you and the other actors and the director, and what matters is the truth ... and that moment,” Murphy adds. “All the f---ing research in the world isn’t going to help you there. I’ve become better at doing that, being open.”
Open perhaps on the set, but off the set, Murphy is an unusually private man. He does not dislike giving interviews, but he is happy to point out he does not always see the value in them. He acknowledges his work gives him a public profile, but does not see himself as a celebrity. And his anonymity, he says, is one of the most important tools in the actor’s toolkit.
“I don’t know if [fame] is destructive, but I don’t think it’s useful,” Murphy says. “I’ve always felt that way. It always seemed logical to me that the less people know about you, the more willing they are to invest in you on screen. That seems entirely logical to me.
Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan with Cillian Murphy.Credit: Maja Smiejkowska
“And I think people are probably f---ing sick of me saying this, but I don’t see any reason why you should be a personality, just because you’re an actor,” Murphy adds. “In fact, I think, again, that’s not useful. And so I try not to do that because I’m not good at it and I just want to put everything into the work.”
And between February and May last year that is what he did. The film was shot on location in New Mexico, New Jersey and California, and explosives were used to re-create the Trinity nuclear test, the historic nuclear detonation that defined Oppenheimer’s legacy. Nolan was inflexible on that one point: a real explosion was required for the cameras to capture.
Murphy would spend part of the film fencing with Robert Downey jnr’s character Lewis Strauss, the former naval officer and political identity who was initially Oppenheimer’s ally, but ultimately became a key figure in the 1954 investigation by the Atomic Energy Commission into Oppenheimer’s background and associations.
Nolan gifted the two actors an unexpected and somewhat whimsical jumping-off point: the 1984 Milos Forman film Amadeus. “I put a lot of time and effort into the walk, the voice, the shape of his body, all of that,” Murphy says. “But something very useful that Chris said was, watch Amadeus again.”
Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders.
Specifically, Nolan pointed to the relationship between the older composer Antonio Salieri, instrumental in the early career of Mozart but for whom the relationship was ultimately poisoned by jealousy. “That relationship, Salieri/Mozart, that’s the similar sort of dynamic that he was setting up here,” Murphy says. “It became very clear to me then that’s kind of what he wanted this Strauss/Oppenheimer relationship to be like.”
Murphy and Downey jnr, however, did not spend too much time talking about it, Murphy says. “Downey is so super smart and has incredible insights and is incredibly emotionally available. But the way I work, I don’t really like talking about it too much. I don’t see the benefit of it,” Murphy says.
“In those scenes with Downey, there was some f---ing energetic transfer, some vibrations between the two of us that it felt to me like ... like we were playing music,” Murphy adds. “He’s such a f---ing brilliant actor and he’s so responsive to the tiniest shift in energy from the other actor. And there were times where Chris would let us just improvise and it was kind of electric.”
Christian Bale as Batman and Cillian Murphy as Dr. Jonathan Crane in Batman Begins.
History’s relationship with Oppenheimer is as complicated as Nolan’s attempt to craft a narrative around him. Strauss’s inquiry tried to turn him into a pariah and was, to some extent, successful; Oppenheimer’s security clearance was revoked. But Strauss’s ambition to become Secretary of Commerce was also derailed.
Then, in 2020, 55 years after Oppenheimer died and 68 years after the clearance was revoked, it was quietly reinstated by the US government, which described the original investigation as “a flawed process that violated the commission’s own regulations”. The timing is revealing, says Murphy. “I wondered, did they do that prior to all the noise around this film? Knowing that the spotlight would make people re-ask the question?” he says.
In the final analysis, Murphy reflects, Oppenheimer the man was somewhat unknowable. “In a conventional movie, the protagonist’s arc goes from A to B, something happens, and they’re a changed character. End of movie,” Murphy says.
“The case with Oppenheimer was all over the place. It was kind of unclear where he stood. He was unreachable, even to the people close to him. But when you’ve got arguably the greatest director of his generation, you just lean into him.
“I leaned into Chris all the time in terms of where we were and where he stood and his journey morally. I didn’t think it was an important message film, I never thought like that. All I was thinking about was trying to make the performance as truthful and as honest and as accessible as possible.”
Oppenheimer opens in cinemas on July 20.
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