Murphy tries to recreate his response to this news. “Cillian, I’d love you to play the lead in this new thing,” he said.

Nolan doesn’t actually have a telephone, or an email, or computer for that matter: “He’s the most analogue individual you could possibly encounter.” So, Emma said Chris would like a word and passed the receiver, then the director came on the line. It was Nolan’s wife, the producer Emma Thomas, who called Murphy one afternoon at the home he shares with his wife, artist Yvonne McGuinness, and two teenage sons. Previous collaborations with Nolan include the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception and Dunkirk, “significant milestones in my career,” he says, adding that Nolan “might be the perfect director”. Then 28 Days Later Intermission Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley. He appeared first on stage in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs, then the screen adaptation. When he first appeared on our screens, looking like a renaissance painting of Saint Sebastian – chiselled head contrasting with translucent blue eyes – it was impossible not to be distracted. While Hollywood might not know him as a leading man, this quietly intense actor has long been celebrated in the UK and Ireland, most notably for his nine-year stint as Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders. Murphy’s portrayal is said to be astonishing (“Oscar-worthy” is the buzz). Photograph: Robert Viglasky/BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd 2019 “What does with film, it fucks you up a little bit.” It’s going to knock people out,” he adds. It feels sometimes like a biopic, sometimes like a thriller, sometimes like a horror.

“I don’t like watching myself – it’s like, ‘Oh, fucking hell’ – but it’s an extraordinary piece of work. But he relaxes when I ask if he’s pleased with Oppenheimer. Murphy loathes interviews, looks visibly tortured at points. The only background noise is the low hum of a wine refrigerator. The room is dark, the sun shining through a solitary Velux lighting his features like a Géricault. So, yes, here we sit in an empty upstairs room of a restaurant near his house in Monkstown, Dublin, working out how to do this. Nolan? The studio? The US government? All I know is that as well as Murphy being gagged by hefty NDAs, I am not allowed to see it (“bit unfortunate”, he concedes). It’s not clear who issued these instructions. Which is awkward when you’ve flown to his home in Ireland to interview him specifically about playing the physicist who oversaw the creation of the atomic bomb, later detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Murphy is under “strict instructions” not to talk about the content. Cillian Murphy is struggling with what he can and can’t say about his title role in Oppenheimer, the latest Christopher Nolan epic, such is the secrecy surrounding this film.

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