Cillian Murphy has been one of the best actors working in film and television for over twenty years. The strange thing is that many people only really noticed in 2023, when Oppenheimer gave him a role worthy of the talent he had been quietly demonstrating since 28 Days Later in 2002. That is not a complaint — late recognition is better than none — but it is worth tracing the full arc of a career that deserves more attention than it has typically received.
Murphy first came to wide attention in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, where he played the bewildered everyman waking up in a deserted London to find civilisation had collapsed. The role required him to be reactive rather than proactive — to register the world through his face — and he was extraordinary at it. Those pale blue eyes, unusually expressive and difficult to read, became his trademark. You can never quite tell what Murphy's characters are thinking, which creates a magnetic tension on screen.
Batman Begins gave him a mainstream platform playing the Scarecrow, a relatively small role that he made more memorable than the writing deserved. But it was his collaboration with Steven Knight on Peaky Blinders that gave him the role of a career. Thomas Shelby, the Birmingham gang leader navigating the aftermath of the First World War, is one of the great television characters of the modern era. Murphy plays him with an extraordinary coiled stillness — a man of great violence who has learned to project absolute control. Six series and a feature film in development, the character has become iconic.
Christopher Nolan cast Murphy in small roles in several films over the years — Inception, Dunkirk, The Dark Knight — before giving him the lead in Oppenheimer. The film is three hours long and Murphy is in almost every frame. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the first Irish actor to win in the lead category. The acceptance speech, characteristically quiet and gracious, felt entirely like the man as he has always presented himself: modest, serious about his craft, slightly uncomfortable with the attention.
He is fifty now and at the absolute peak of his powers. Whatever comes next will be worth watching. Some actors take decades to be recognised. Murphy is one of them, and the recognition, when it finally came, was fully deserved.
