“His films were massive for me”: the 2012 co-star Cillian Murphy called his “acting hero”
It has been a very big five years for Cillian Murphy, and in fact, it’s tough to think of another actor who has had a more monumental half-decade since we all sat meekly in our houses while the government told us we’d get arrested if we tried to go to the shops in groups of more than two people while they had pizza parties and affairs in London.
While plenty of people obviously knew Murphy before 2020, the year he starred in John Krasinski’s horror sequel A Quiet Place II, his rise since then has been fairly astronomic, because in the years following he has become a ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award winner thanks to Christopher Nolan’s magnificent Oppenheimer, coming in 20 years after he was first Golden Globe nominated for playing a transgender woman in Breakfast on Pluto.
In some ways, Murphy already had his rise to fame back when Danny Boyle cast him as the lead in the brilliant zombie dystopia 28 Days Later, which led to parts in several major movies without ever quite making the jump to proper recognisable film star. There were the likes of 2005’s aviation thriller Red Eye with Rachel McAdams, for example, and another great Boyle outing in the underrated sci-fi Sunshine.
His partnership with Nolan started pretty early on, with Batman Begins, and he has made five movies with the great director since, including Inception and Dunkirk, but perhaps his smartest move came in 2013 when he took on the lead part of Tommy Shelby in the Midlands gang drama Peaky Blinders, the hit BBC show that would go on to feature an array of talent over six seasons including Sam Neill, Tom Hardy, Adrien Brody, Helen McCrory and Annabelle Wallis.
Murphy was a revelation in the bloody series that featured the story of a Birmingham traveller gang in the early 1900s, and last year things came to a head with the Netflix-backed spin-off movie Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. It gave Murphy the chance to go head-to-head with one of his acting heroes in the form of Pulp Fiction’s Tim Roth, and the former was effusive in his praise.
He told the Radio Times, “Tim Roth is one of my favourite actors, and we’d worked together before, and I was able to ask him to come and play in this one. He’s brilliant in the film!”
He added that Roth was “an acting hero of mine growing up”, explaining, “Even before I became an actor, his films were massive for me. I once gave him an award in Dublin and embarrassed him, just spoke about every film. And then I was lucky enough to make a film with him about ten years ago, a smaller film called Broken.”
Broken was a 2012 British drama loosely based on To Kill a Mockingbird, that saw Roth as the father of a young girl living in North London who witnesses a violent attack by a neighbour on a man falsely accused of rape. It received mixed reviews, but both Roth and Murphy were nominated for industry awards for their performances in the film.
Currently, Murphy is working on the third instalment of A Quiet Place, which will see Emily Blunt and Krasinski return after the success of the Lupita Nyong’o spin-off A Quiet Place: Day One, which was released in 2024. He is also expected to play some part in 28 Years Later: Part III, due to be penned by Alex Garland.
