‘Oppenheimer’: Cillian Murphy On His “Instinctual” Approach, The “Genius” Of Christopher Nolan & Some Bowie Inspiration

For Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy plunged deep into the mind and physicality of an iconic scientist that irrevocably changed our world. At once complex, conflicting, stylish and brilliant, Oppenheimer’s life and work is not an immediately obvious choice for an epic blockbuster subject. And yet, Christopher Nolan’s decision to ask his longtime collaborator Murphy to step into the physicist’s shoes resulted in a cinematic experience that would outstrip every superhero movie at the box office last year. Here, Murphy describes inhabiting the man behind the atom bomb and why he always delights in working with Nolan.

DEADLINE: Obviously, there are 20 years of trust between you and Christopher Nolan — this is your sixth film together. When he asked you to play this huge lead role, did he reveal exactly why he thought of you for it?

CILLIAN MURPHY: This is another example of his kind of brilliance, but when he writes parts, he never thinks of actors because he thinks that if he did that it would limit how he’d write the character. He wants to write in a way that would not be limited by what he thinks I could or couldn’t do. So, he said, when he finished it, he had the book beside him and he looked at the picture of Oppenheimer, and thought, “OK, I think I know the guy who can do this.” To me, that’s a true gift, because there were no limitations on what he expected from me, or what I expected I could bring to the part. And that’s exactly what you want from any role, really.

DEADLINE: So, he’s saying on the one hand, there’s the physicality he knew you could work with. He gave you some images of a young Davie Bowie too, for that shape and elegance he and Oppenheimer shared.

MURPHY: Exactly. And I also think definitely sartorially, he was an inspiration, but also in terms of the way he self-anthologized very consciously and created personas for himself — the way Bowie did, like Oppenheimer also did, it was very deliberate. Everything was deliberate with him. The pipe, the hat, the tailoring, even the cars that he drove, the way he spoke, the way he was interested in all aspects of the arts as well as being a genius scientist. He was polymathic in his interests and Bowie was the same.

Now again, these are things that just kind of hover in the background. They’re never in the front of your mind, but it’s all very, very useful for me to take inspiration from many different areas. But I think it was particularly useful for me and [costume designer] Ellen [Mirojnick] for the tailoring of the suits. Bowie was incredibly slim and Oppenheimer was very, very self-conscious about his physique. He was so frail physically, but so formidable intellectually, and then he began to use his frailty, I think, in terms of his silhouette, he used it to its strength with the tailoring and stuff. Those huge pants that I think are so flattering on men, the high-waisted — I love a trouser like that.

DEADLINE: How did you build the character from there? You had Nolan’s very comprehensive, detailed script, but what else were you looking at?

MURPHY: There’s so much out there. There’s so much text, there’s so many books, and I just dove in. It was a pleasure to read, and firsthand accounts of him were really, really useful to me. People that knew him, had spent time with him.

I even spoke to Kip Thorne, who was the science advisor on this movie and who worked on Interstellar with Chris — he was lectured by Oppenheimer when he was a young man. So there were first-hand accounts of Kip telling me how Oppenheimer would move on the lectern and how he would carry his pipe.

And then there are all these images of how he sat in very peculiar ways. He would sit on a desk with one leg kind of tucked up underneath the other, and we put that into the movie. And there are pictures of him like that.

And so, you’re all the time building, building, and building, and building, like the way he always liked to stand with his hand on his hip. There were lots of pictures of him standing like that I just stole. And then you work it into the physicality.

The thing about the footage of him was it was mostly footage of him giving lectures, which naturally lends itself to a performative way of talking and not a sort of a candid [way]. So, I have to extrapolate back from that to go, “Right, so if that’s what he’s like when he’s talking or being interviewed, what would he be like if he’s just having a chat like this or with his family or whatever?”

It was fascinating and really rich, and there was so much of it. I worked really, really closely with Chris all the time, just trying to pick and choose what we thought would be useful and not useful. But we were never going to do an impression. We always were very clear that we were making a feature film, and it was a piece of entertainment, but yet we had to be true to the iconography and to how he presented himself.

DEADLINE: Like the examples that Oppenheimer walked on the balls of his feet and he had a verbal tic. Those were the kinds of things you didn’t choose to include because they’re a little on the nose? Like you say, you don’t want to do an impression, you want to evoke.

MURPHY: Yeah, there were a lot of firsthand accounts of him having a terrible hacking smokers’ cough all the time. But if you put that into a character, it’s just immediately signaling that someone’s going to die soon. So, first off, you just leave that out. And again, this points to Chris’ genius. Oppenheimer is the only character in the film that smokes. He’s the only character in the film that has a hat. So, you’re immediately, again, subliminally directing the audience towards this character and his behaviors as opposed to making it historically accurate, where everybody would’ve smoked, and everyone would’ve worn a hat. I really do find all that stuff so rewarding and exciting in the prep period.

DEADLINE: Clearly Oppenheimer was very ambitious as a scientist, but he also seems to have teetered on the edge of insanity in some ways. What did you make of his attempt to poison his college lecturer with an apple? He acted in a fairly sociopathic way then, but later he battles with his conscience in other ways. How did you reconcile those two things?

MURPHY: That to me is just exactly what you want in a character, fictional or not. That contradiction and complexity is just amazing to play. And I think even in his early days, he was so complex, and he was very fragile, I think, emotionally and mentally as a young man. Maybe as a result of being a preternatural genius and walking around looking at the world in far more dimensions than the average person. But then I also think that as he got older, he began to form himself as much, much clearer.

The truth is, for me, I never, ever come down on one side or the other with a character. I never ever go, “Right, this is the character and this is how I’m going to play it, and I’m going to apply my moral framework to this character.” I never judge them. I think that’s up to the audience.

DEADLINE: Right, if you did that, how would you play them? Because they wouldn’t do that to themselves. That’s not how people are.

MURPHY: Exactly. It’s really reductive and not useful. So, I don’t ever do that. And even when I play a scene, I never ever know how I’m going to play the scene until we actually go to play it. Because again, like you and I, we don’t know when we walk into a room how we’re going to interact with the person. We don’t know how the conversation’s going to go. We don’t know who else is going to walk into that room. We don’t know what information they’re going to give us. So, for me, in acting, it’s not an intellectual exercise, it’s an instinctual one. Now, I do all of the intellectual work and graft beforehand, but then when we get into the room, I kind of shake it all off and it’s just about the humanity of the character.

DEADLINE: Did it help you at all that you’d played a physicist before in the 2007 film Sunshine?

MURPHY: It did, actually, because I did an awful lot of research for that role as well. And I spent an awful lot of time with Dr. Brian Cox, the professor, and we had actually gone to CERN. We used to go for dinner and hang out with the most brilliant people in the world. And it was really interesting how rationality meets sentimentality, or how reason meets love, and all of these things.

DEADLINE: What was your takeaway from those brilliant people?

MURPHY: That I don’t think it’s necessarily a gift. I think it might be a burden.

DEADLINE: Have your teenage sons seen Oppenheimer? Did it spark an interesting moral debate with them?

MURPHY: Yeah, we had lots of great chats. My boys, they’re pretty smart kids and they love movies, not just because that’s what I do, but they just love them. And we watch a lot of movies together and we have great discussions. But the crazy thing about this one was that there were lots of young people going to see this film repeatedly. There were people dressing up as Oppenheimer and going to the cinema to watch the movie. None of us could have expected that a three-hour R-rated biopic about a physicist would have this kind of cultural reach and this connection, and not just with what you would assume would be the demographic and people that would be history buffs or would know about this, but with young people. It’s so heartening and it’s such a fantastic result for cinema, I think.