Despite playing the father of the atomic bomb in a big budget biographical drama hailing from one of the industry’s most meticulous filmmakers, Cillian Murphy has admitted that he’s not been brushing up on math, science, or nuclear physics ahead of his leading role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
That’s completely understandable when the star doesn’t want his brain to frazzle from the intricate combinations of calculations and theories that would need to be learned, especially when his job at the end of the day is to recite lines of dialogue from a script, as opposed to becoming an expert in mechanics well beyond his reach.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, the Peaky Blinders star confirmed that he’d been doing his homework ahead of shooting, and it sounds as though he’s eager to dive deep into the man who ended up regretting his groundbreaking accomplishments without crunching the numbers.
“[I prepped by doing] an awful lot of reading. I’m interested in the man and what [inventing the atomic bomb] does to the individual. The mechanics of it, that’s not really for me — I don’t have the intellectual capability to understand them, but these contradictory characters are fascinating. People identify with that, because we all walk around with these contradictory ideas coexisting in our heads.”
At the very least, we can expect Oppenheimer to be one of the best-acted movies to come along in a while when it hits theaters in July 2023, with Murphy being joined by a murderers’ row of talent that includes Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid, Alden Ehrenreich, Kenneth Branagh, and more.
