‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast: Cillian Murphy on ‘Oppenheimer,’ Potential ‘Peaky Blinders’ Movie and Making a Musical

Cillian Murphy, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is a terrific Irish actor who The New York Times has said is “known for his electrifying, typecast-defying turns in a range of movies, big and small.” Backstage has called him “a chameleonic performer, a character actor trapped in a leading man’s bone structure.” Interview magazine has noted he has had a tremendously impressive career but “is still somehow cruelly underrated, and only getting better.”

Murphy’s standout film credits include 2002’s 28 Days Later; 2005’s Breakfast on Pluto, for which he received a best musical/comedy actor Golden Globe nom; and 2021’s A Quiet Place, Part II. He also anchored, between 2013 and 2022, Peaky Blinders, the massively acclaimed drama series about a Birmingham gang during the years between World War I and World War II. It aired on BBC2 in the U.K. and streamed to massive numbers on Netflix.

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But he is most associated with the films by Christopher Nolan, who describes him as “one of the great actors of his generation, both on stage and on film.” Murphy has appeared in six of them over nearly 20 years: 2005’s Batman Begins, 2008’s The Dark Knight, 2010’s Inception, 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, 2017’s Dunkirk and, most recently, 2023’s Oppenheimer. In the latter, he portrays J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist and father of the atomic bomb, for which he won the best drama actor Golden Globe Award and best actor BAFTA Award. He was nominated for the best actor Critic Choice Award and is nominated for the best actor SAG and Academy Awards.

Over the course of a conversation at the Los Angeles offices of The Hollywood Reporter, the 47-year-old reflected on why and how he suddenly shifted paths from making music to acting; why and how he fought for the role of Tommy Shelby on Peaky Blinders; how he and Nolan first came to work together; what distinguishes Nolan’s sets and films from others; and how he reacted to being offered the lead in a Nolan film for the first time with Oppenheimer.

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