“I’m not sure whatever happened”: the only Cillian Murphy movie you’ll never see
It’s quite possible that Cillian Murphy’s career will always be defined by his collaborations with Christopher Nolan, but this would be underselling his adventurous nature as an actor.
Sure, Nolan goes to unusual places with his filmmaking, but he is also pretty consistent with his themes, while Murphy, on the other hand, has tried a lot more than time-hopping, for instance, starting out as an actor in the eerie coming-of-age drama Disco Pigs, playing an emotionally intense teenager who has an unhealthily powerful bond with his best friend.
Later, of course, he attained fame by playing the main character in Danny Boyle’s zombie movie 28 Days Later and earned a Golden Globe nomination for playing a transgender woman (when it was still widely accepted that cisgender actors portrayed these roles) in the 2005 film Breakfast on Pluto.
The fact that he became famous for the Batman franchise and that ridiculously entertaining 2005 thriller Red Eye has obscured many of his most interesting roles, but one of those roles didn’t need any help disappearing, as shortly after his rise to fame in the early 2000s, Murphy starred in a movie called Hippie Hippie Shake that, nearly two decades later, has never been released.
Directed by Beeban Kidron, it starred him as Richard Neville, the founder of the satirical Australian magazine Oz, with Sienna Miller playing his wife, Louise, while Chris O’Dowd, Hugh Bonneville, and Derek Jacobi played supporting roles. The story was based on Neville’s memoir and charted the 1960s counterculture scene in London, where he and his colleagues were hauled into court for publishing ‘obscene’ material.
It was shot in 2007, but Kidron exited the project during post-production due to the catch-all bogeyman known as creative differences. A rough cut was screened for a handful of test audiences, and a limited release was planned for 2010, but it never happened, and finally, in 2011, it was shelved, which is maddening considering that it exists in a completed form that could presumably just be released as-is.
Speaking to Yahoo in 2017, Miller shed some extremely dim light on the matter, saying, “I’m not sure whatever happened with [Hippie Hippie Shake]. I don’t think it’s…I don’t think we’ll see it at this point.”
She said that she had seen a rough cut of it and thought it was “pretty beautiful”, but explained that there was “some legal something or other” that made its release impossible.
This spectacularly vague revelation is possibly the most detail we’ll ever get, since all of the people involved have moved on, and the campaign for its release has apparently fizzled. For those who are still curious about the story itself, you can simply watch the BBC version from 1991, The Trials of Oz, which stars Hugh Grant as Neville; it isn’t the best historical drama you’ll ever watch, but the hair does not disappoint.
