Christopher Nolan calls Cillian Murphy “one of the best actors of his generation”
The buzz surrounding Oppenheimer, the new film from director Christopher Nolan, is reaching almost critical levels ahead of the July 21st release. Several points of interest are piquing audiences’ interest, most notably being the central performance by Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, engineer of the first atomic bomb.
The film has reportedly left people so stunned “they can’t speak”, and has been cited by Nolan himself as something more akin to a horror film due to its intensity and visceral, hallucinogenic depiction of the quantum physics involved in atomic detonation.
The director, known for avoiding CGI as much as possible, has repeatedly made headlines for asking his visual effects team to produce a ‘real’, in-camera nuclear explosion.
However, Nolan recently brought attention back to the human factor in his film. During a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, the director explained how after “months and months of staring at the biography’s cover” (the picture of Oppenheimer himself), it suddenly occurred to him that Cillian Murphy was the only choice, calling him “one of the best actors of his generation”.
“I’ve never seen an actor with such a commitment to the truth,” said the director. “But I’d never had him as the lead, so it was a thrill to be able to call him and say, ‘This is the one’.”
While Murphy was undoubtedly impressive on-set and in the moment, Nolan revealed how it was only once he was editing the picture that the scale of the actor’s performance truly hit him: “The performance became all-enveloping, when I realized Cillian had so much more going on than I saw on set.”
The director further praised the actor and his ability to knowingly project a performance that will be captured explicitly on film, drawing parallels to his time working with Al Pacino on Insomnia. “Great film actors can do that,” Nolan said, “And that’s what I had with Cillian.”
Never Miss A Scene
The Far Out Film Newsletter
All the latest film news from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.