The 2001 war movie that almost denied Cillian Murphy his big break: “He’ll do alright”
It may not have been his first feature-length appearance, but Cillian Murphy would be the first to admit that he owes the career that he has entirely to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.
Playing the lead role and delivering an effortlessly engaging performance in a slow-burning smash hit that inspired the next two decades of zombie cinema is a hell of a way to land your breakthrough big-screen role, but he could have lost it because of a war movie he had absolutely nothing to do with.
Even though Boyle was one of the United Kingdom’s most recognisable and acclaimed directors, he knew he wouldn’t have an awful lot of budget to work with. That meant he had to peer further down the casting list than he’d have liked when searching for the ideal actor to play the protagonist, Jim.
His last film may have cost $50 million and paid almost half of that directly to star Leonardo DiCaprio, but a lo-fi horror flick shot primarily on location in London and the surrounding areas was a different kettle of zombified fish. He needed someone affordable who was also a good actor, and as it happened, there was a decent crop of British and Irish actors coming through at the same time.
“I’ll tell you who did audition for Jim,” Boyle revealed. “Tom Hardy and Orlando Bloom.” The pair, who would go on to much bigger and better things, had both recently featured in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, alongside other soon-to-be-known names like Eric Bana, Ioan Gruffudd, Hugh Dancy, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
It was Hardy’s first role in a movie and Bloom’s third, with his second, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, releasing a week earlier. Boyle recalls that when they auditioned, the duo had “finished Black Hawk Down,” and since he didn’t have a lot of money to work with, he “wanted newbies who just didn’t know which way it would break with them.”
“We saw Cillian, and I remember thinking, ‘Whoa, he’ll have an amazing career’, I remember thinking that,” the Academy Award winner remembered. “I remembered thinking that about Orlando Bloom, I thought, ‘He’ll do alright.'” Correct on both counts, but strangely enough, no mention of Hardy.
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That makes sense, because all three had major genre films released in 2002, but only two of them benefited. Murphy headlined 28 Days Later, and Bloom returned as Legolas in The Two Towers, but poor Hardy suffered the ignominy of playing the villain in the dismal Star Trek: Nemesis, and it’s an understatement to call that the short end of the stick.
Patrick Stewart thought he’d never see or hear from his young co-star again, but in the end, Hardy did alright for himself, too.
