Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer performance went beyond Christopher Nolan’s expectations

Christopher Nolan says he was blown away by Cillian Murphy's performance in Oppenheimer. In the new cover feature of Total Film magazine, which goes into detail about the making of the historical epic, Nolan shares why the Peaky Blinders actor was right for the role.

"In truth, there are just not that many actors that you could say, on a first-person approach, 'Yeah, we’re going to be this guy for three hours,'" Nolan tells TF in its new issue – which is out on newsstands on May 25. "You’re making a demand of an actor that very few actors in the history of film can rise to. I will say that even with that confidence in him, he was continually surprising me on set every day. And when we got into the edit suite and were putting the performance together, and seeing the truth of it, I was absolutely blown away." 

Murphy plays J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who is considered to be the father of the atomic bomb. His work on the Manhattan Project oversaw the creation of the world's most destructive weapon, although he would later go on to lobby against nuclear proliferation.

The actor explains to Total Film that he had only a surface awareness of Oppenheimer before throwing himself into the project: "I think I had kind of Wikipedia-level of knowledge of Oppenheimer, like most people," Murphy explains. "So then it was… Well, it was just starting from scratch, really. Chris guided me through that. You can only do it one bite at a time. You have to go slowly. And thankfully we had time."

Murphy says that he was never going to do an impersonation of the real Oppenheimer, "but it was very helpful to me to find that silhouette, to be able to embrace the iconography of him, which was the hat and the pipe, and certainly the cut of his suits, and to try to find a physical shape that would make that as iconic as [he was in real life]. Because he was very conscious about that. It wasn’t by accident. He chose that look for himself."

• Preorder the Oppenheimer issue of Total Film now

Oppenheimer lands in cinemas on July 21, 2023. This is just a snippet of our interview in the new issue of Total Film magazine, which features Christopher Nolan's epic Oppenheimer on the cover. The magazine hits shelves this Thursday, May 25. Check out the covers below:

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