The role Cillian Murphy didn’t think he could play: “I needed to convince them I could do it”
If you’ve seen Cillian Murphy in something recently, it’s probably Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, where he plays the titular scientist haunted by grief. Or maybe you were marathoning Nolan’s Batman trilogy and saw him as Johnathan Crane or ‘The Scarecrow’. In both roles, he wants to kill a lot of people and succeeds in doing so, albeit with different motives.
Or maybe you’re watching or rewatching Peaky Blinders. Up until Oppenheimer it was probably Murphy’s most popular role. Either you know someone with his haircut, or you’re lying to yourself. Or don’t live in Britain. He plays Thomas Shelby, a shell-shocked WWI veteran and Birmingham mobster who spends much of the show glaring at people through azure eyes, cool as you like. The show was a hit and ran for six seasons, with a sequel movie, The Immortal Man, in production as we speak.
If this body of work is your only familiarity with Murphy (and it’s certainly his most popular), then you may have some consideration of him as an actor who specializes in potent, dangerous characters. This was not always the case, though, as he got his start as an actor in sensitive, small films like Disco Pigs and Breakfast on Pluto. If you’ve seen Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley, though, a film where he plays a courageous Irish militant, you may have had more faith in Murphy as an assertive and commanding actor.
But for the part of Thomas Shelby, Murphy was determined to prove that he had range beyond playing waifs and strays. Speaking with EW, he says, “There was slight hesitation because I’d never really played that physically imposing sort of hyper-masculine-type character” Did he forget his time with Ken Loach?
At any rate, it was an uphill battle for Murphy to land the role of Thomas Shelby. He says, “In fact, I’d probably played the opposite up to that point. But I knew that it was such amazing material and I knew that it was a gift of a role and I just needed to convince them that I could do it and I could work to become that physically imposing character.” The producers made the right call. They’re still counting the dollars that they’ve made off Peaky Blinders.
Whether you like the show or not—what it was or where it went—it’s almost impossible to imagine someone else playing Tommy Shelby. No one but Murphy could fit into his flat cap and bridge coat. He’ll go down in popular imagination as one of the more iconic gangster characters of this generation, like Michael Corleone or the Tonys Montana and Soprano, the characters that you’re not supposed to like but young men admire and idolize anyway.
Murphy famously dislikes doing press and comes off as a little self-conscious in interviews, but he was more assertive when interviewing for the part of Shelby. Apparently, he told Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders, “Remember, I’m an actor. That person you just met isn’t the person who’s going to show up on day one.” And there are more days to come.
