The reality TV show Cillian Murphy is strangely obsessed with: “Such terrible people, all of them”
There are plenty of actors who actively despise the idea of being a celebrity, and Cillian Murphy winning an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ won’t do his distaste for the trappings that come with being a movie star any favours.
The star is notoriously private and fiercely protective of his ability to lead a relatively quiet life away from his day job, but scooping the most prestigious onscreen accolade in the industry for playing the title character in a seven-time Oscar-winning biographical drama that nabbed ‘Best Picture’ and came close to earning a billion dollars at the box office has raised his profile to its highest level yet.
Whether it’s a conscious desire to avoid the sort of material that brings the most eyeballs or a determination to continue carving out a reputation as a thespian who’s always drawn to the strongest material first and foremost, Murphy has largely shied away from the blockbuster business.
Huge movies that make massive amounts of money are the ones that create and sustain A-listers, but it’s telling that the majority of Murphy’s credits that fit the mould are Nolan-adjacent. There’s the Dark Knight trilogy and Inception, along with his turn in Transcendence, the feature-length directorial debut of his regular collaborator’s longtime director of photography, Wally Pfister.
Outside of that, he went uncredited in Tron: Legacy, and that’s about it. He’s a star who hates the concept of stardom, a world-famous actor who can’t sanction the notion of being accosted by adoring fans or paparazzi when he’s in public, and an Oscar winner who’s visibly uncomfortable with the idea of promotion and publicity.
Murphy will always view himself as a husband and father first and foremost, so in a way, it makes perfect sense that he enjoys a bit of trash TV. Everybody has their guilty pleasures, and for the Irishman, he admitted to The Guardian he’d become strangely obsessed with a series where would-be entrepreneurs seek investment from cutthroat business magnates looking for the next big thing to boost their bank balance.
“I can watch Dragons’ Den for hours,” he confessed. “Why are they in that warehouse? Why is the music so ominous? Why are they sitting there with piles of cash like mini-dictators? Such terrible people, all of them. It’s riveting.”
He wouldn’t be the first to question why a show with such a simple ‘pitch-and-invest’ model needs to be scored like a horror flick or why a vast and cavernous warehouse needs to serve as the backdrop for a set that essentially amounts to some chairs, plenty of cash, and little else. Of course, a heavy degree of ruthlessness is required to succeed in the business world and make millions, which handily explains why he finds so many of the investors to be such reprehensible human beings.
