The one Christopher Nolan movie Cillian Murphy regrets missing out on: “It broke my heart”
Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy have one of the great symbiotic relationships in modern Hollywood.
Like George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn, it’s impossible to imagine one of their careers without the other. Sure, Nolan would almost certainly be as highly acclaimed a director without Murphy in his life, and the actor would almost certainly be the generational talent that he is even without Nolan, but together, they are the stuff that Hollywood dreams are made of.
Their collaboration started way back in the early 2000s when Nolan fell in love with Murphy’s eyes (yes, really) while watching 28 Days Later. So far, so relatable. He was looking for someone to play Bruce Wayne and invited the young Irish actor to dinner, only to realise quite quickly that he was not the right man for the job.
They hit it off nonetheless, and the director realised that he had found his holy grail of a collaborator. He cast Murphy as Scarecrow instead of Batman, which helped solidify their working relationship, but which didn’t give the actor anywhere near the amount of screen time he deserved. Over the years, they have made six movies together, but it wasn’t until 2023 that Murphy finally got a role in a Nolan movie that was worthy of his abilities.
It’s safe to say that Murphy and only Murphy could have brought the behemoth undertaking of Oppenheimer to life. Where Nolan has a tendency to get lost in the spectacle and temporal carpet-pulling of his movies, Murphy brings buckets and buckets of humanity (have I mentioned his eyes?) In fact, Nolan probably owes a lot more to Murphy for the success of that film than the other way around.
Despite their decades-long collaboration, they do occasionally take breaks from each other, as all partners should. Murphy even expressed relief at the fact that he wasn’t involved in The Odyssey, presumably because Oppenheimer was such a gargantuan undertaking that such a quick re-entry into the Nolan-verse might do him in. However, there is one film that he regrets not starring in. During an interview with The Independent in 2023, the star said that it was Nolan’s foray into space travel that gave him fomo.
“I adore Interstellar just because I find it so emotional,” he said, explaining that he watched it in the cinema when his kids were still young. “It just had a big impact on me,” he continued. “It broke my heart. I love watching his films when I’m not in them because you don’t have to freak out about the size of your ears, or whatever.”
Interstellar is one of Nolan’s most emotional films, delving into familial relationships, grief, and, of course, time, with Matthew McConaughey starring as Cooper, a farmer and NASA physicist who is recruited to pilot a spacecraft through a wormhole in search of a habitable planet, and jis choice over whether to leave his children forever and save the world or stay with his children and watch humanity collapse is about as emotional as it gets, so it’s no wonder Murphy found it so moving.
Although the Oppenheimer star would have made an excellent Cooper, it’s hard to envision anyone other than McConaughey in the role. He has just the right amount of astronaut-y bravado and American swagger to play a physicist-turned-farmer-turned-physicist, and it’s one of his greatest performances.
