It’s going to knock people out,” he adds. It feels sometimes like a biopic, sometimes like a thriller, sometimes like a horror. “I don’t like watching myself – it’s like, ‘Oh, fucking hell’ – but it’s an extraordinary piece of work. But he relaxes when I ask if he’s pleased with Oppenheimer. Murphy loathes interviews, looks visibly tortured at points. The only background noise is the low hum of a wine refrigerator. The room is dark, the sun shining through a solitary Velux lighting his features like a Géricault.
So, yes, here we sit in an empty upstairs room of a restaurant near his house in Monkstown, Dublin, working out how to do this. Nolan? The studio? The US government? All I know is that as well as Murphy being gagged by hefty NDAs, I am not allowed to see it (“bit unfortunate”, he concedes). It’s not clear who issued these instructions. Which is awkward when you’ve flown to his home in Ireland to interview him specifically about playing the physicist who oversaw the creation of the atomic bomb, later detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Murphy is under “strict instructions” not to talk about the content. Cillian Murphy is struggling with what he can and can’t say about his title role in Oppenheimer, the latest Christopher Nolan epic, such is the secrecy surrounding this film.
