Cillian Murphy Biography

Cillian Murphy is the lanky, blue-eyed actor whose starring role in the 2003 zombie movie 28 Days Later led to bigger Hollywood roles in Batman Begins (2005) and Red Eye (2005), and then to his breakthrough starring role in the television series Peaky Blinders. He also won an Oscar for playing physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the 2023 film Oppenheimer.

Cillian Murphy sang in a rock band and started law school before dropping out in favor of a career in the theater. He began getting movie roles in the late 1990s, but it was the surprise success of 28 Days Later that made him a famous face to moviegoers. He had small roles in Intermission (2003, with Colin Farrell), Girl With a Pearl Earring (2003, with Scarlett Johansson) and Cold Mountain (2003, with Nicole Kidman) before landing the plum role of Batman‘s nemesis, The Scarecrow, in Batman Begins (starring Christian Bale).

With his unsettling good looks and pale eyes, Murphy is versatile in offbeat roles — as an icky villain (Red Eye and Batman), a crooning transvestite (Breakfast on Pluto), a sensitive soul (2006’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley and 2007’s Sunshine), or a haunted survivor of alien invasion in A Quiet Place Part II (2020, with Emily Blunt). In 2013 he began playing the cunning gangster Tommy Shelby in BBC TV show Peaky Blinders, a tale of gangs, constables, and underworld intrigue in Birmingham, England after World War I. The popular series continued running into the 2020s.

In the 2023 film Oppenheimer, he played the brilliant and blue-eyed physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the scientific teams on the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb during World War II. Murphy managed to capture Oppenheimer’s quirky charms and tortured soul, and he was named the year’s best actor at the 2024 Academy Awards.

Cillian Murphy’s other films include Inception (2010), Broken (2012), In the Heart of the Sea (2015, directed by Ron Howard), and the World War II drama Dunkirk (2017).