Cillian Murphy

The Failure That Saved a Career

Cillian Murphy lives in Dublin and has no social media. He hates red carpets. In 1996, he dropped out of law at University College Cork after failing every first-year exam. He wasn't interested in criminal law but in music and theater.

He played guitar in a jazz-rock band called The Sons of Mr. Green Genes. They turned down a five-album deal with a London record label because his brother was still in high school. The group disappeared, but Murphy found a spot in the play Disco Pigs that same year.

What was supposed to be a three-week run in a small theater ended up touring halfway around the world for eighteen months.

And theater gave him his craft.

The Alliance with the Million-Dollar Budget

Danny Boyle first saw him on stage and sent him sprinting through an empty London in 28 Days Later (2002). That low-budget production grossed 82 million dollars worldwide. But Murphy didn't want to be a horror star.

In 2003, he auditioned on camera for Christopher Nolan while wearing the Batman suit. He did not land the lead role. Nolan instead gave him the role of the Scarecrow in Batman Begins (2005) after being struck by his gaze on the monitor.

It was the start of a six-film partnership that lasted two decades. Murphy took supporting roles in big blockbusters such as Inception (2010) and Dunkirk (2017) just to work with the British director.

The Weight of the Cap and the Atom

In 2013, he accepted the role of Thomas Shelby in the series Peaky Blinders. He had to start smoking herbal cigarettes and drinking fake whiskey for almost ten years. Production estimated that Murphy smoked more than 3,000 herbal cigarettes per season of filming.

Many actors would have been trapped in the role of the Birmingham gangster.

She isn't after easy applause.

He chose to work with Nolan again on Oppenheimer (2023). To play physicist Robert Oppenheimer, he lost so much weight that he ate only one almond a day, according to his co-stars. He won the Oscar for Best Actor in 2024 after a grueling awards campaign that Murphy himself described as exhausting.

Total Control from the Shadows

He founded his own production company, Big Things Films, to control his own stories. In 2024, he produced and starred in Small Things Like These, a drama about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. He prefers small projects that question his country's identity.

He moved back to Ireland with his family in 2015 after spending fourteen years in London. He paid about €1.7 million for a Victorian-era house in south Dublin that has no high-speed internet connection.

The film Small Things Like These was shot in just four weeks during the winter of 2023.