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“It’s like you’re on this fucking train that’s just bombing. Murphy began to forget about food in the same way he began to forget about sleep. Then again, the hurtling speed at which Nolan worked, crisscrossing the US, made it easy to skip meals. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures ‘He might be the perfect director’: with Nolan on the set of Oppenheimer. I don’t want it to be, ‘Cillian lost x weight for the part’.”

I don’t advise it.” He won’t say how many kilograms he lost, or what food the nutritionist told him to cut out. “You become competitive with yourself a little bit which is not healthy. He was determined to nail the scientist’s silhouette “with the porkpie hat and the pipe”, testing himself to see how little he could eat.

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He has put back on some of the weight he lost for the part, I’m relieved to see his skin isn’t quite so taut over his skull and there are freckles over those eagle-wing cheekbones. Overlaid is Murphy’s narration, “We’re in a race against the Nazis / and I know what it means / if the Nazis have a bomb.” There’s Matt Damon looking porky as army general Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project: “They have a 12-month head start.” Murphy, pointing with cigarette: “18.” Massive explosion against the backdrop of space. There’s Murphy, short back and sides, lifting 1940s eye goggles blue and red atoms coming at him fast orange light white light blackout silence. It’s a rush of snapshots against the crackling of a Geiger counter. In the absence of the three-hour feature, I scrutinise Oppenheimer’s three-minute trailer. Like beyond thrilled.” It is characteristic of Murphy that the modulation of his voice barely changes as he expresses this. 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.

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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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