Before 'Oppenheimer,' Watch This Underrated Cillian Murphy Performance (original) (raw)
Published Jul 17, 2023, 1:00 PM EDT
Lindsey Clouse has been writing about movies and language for over ten years. She has an M.A. in Language and Rhetoric and published her first book, Stigmatized on Screen: How Hollywood Portrays Nonstandard Dialects, in June 2022. She's a massive Trekkie, a huge fan of all things sci-fi, and a cinephile. Her favorite movies include Arrival, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park, and Interstellar, and she has a soft spot for confusing time travel movies like Primer and Tenet. She also loves gritty superhero series like The Boys and has watched Arrested Development from beginning to end (yes, all five seasons) at least four times. She's loving the modern Star Trek rennaissance but if you forced her to choose an all-time favorite series, of course it would be The Next Generation. You can find her at lindseyclouse.com.
Believe it or not, Oppenheimer won't be the first time Cillian Murphy has played a physicist named Robert who is responsible for a bomb that will change the course of human history. In 2007, he starred as physicist Robert Capa in Danny Boyle's Sunshine, a sci-fi thriller set aboard a spaceship in 2057. The sun is dying, and the film follows a crew of eight tasked with launching a massive "stellar bomb" into the sun to reignite it in humanity's last hope of preserving life on Earth. As the ship,Icarus II, makes its way toward the waning but still deadly star, things, of course, begin to go wrong, due in part to human error, in part to human evil, and in part to the terrifying whims of nature.
The premise might sound a little goofy — a bit like a reverse of 2003's The Core — but it's actually quite grounded thanks to writer Alex Garland's dedication to scientific realism. He and Boyle brought in physicist Brian Cox to consult on the film and to help anchor the premise in real scientific theory. There's still a bit of hand waving involved — for instance, it's never explained how the interior of the ship has Earth-like artificial gravity, one of the most complex problems facing actual long-term space missions. But the moviefeels realistic enough that it's easy to overlook such omissions. The film is also surprisingly absorbing, carried by Danny Boyle's masterfully slow build-up of tension, plus strong performances from a stacked cast that includes Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, Mark Strong, and Benedict Wong. The sun itself is also very much a character, its power and proximity having profound but disparate effects on each crew member.
'Sunshine's Production Was Not Your Usual Movie Set
Boyle put the actors through the wringer to achieve those excellent performances: over the course of six weeks prior to filming, they watched movies together, including classics like Das Boot, The Right Stuff, and Alien; went to science lectures; toured a nuclear submarine to get a feel for the claustrophobia of a spaceship; went scuba diving; experienced weightlessness in zero gravity simulators — Boyle himself took a ride on the infamous vomit comet — and even lived together in a minimalist college dorm. As Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Captain Kaneda, told SciFiNow in 2019, “We had small rooms, no TV, no refrigerator but a shared kitchen and every night one of us had to cook for everyone." That experience was recreated in an early scene in the film, when engineer Mace (Evans) complains about navigator Trey's (Wong) cooking, to which Trey responds, "If you don't like it, you take my shift next time." Boyle also insisted on using physical effects to stand in for the computer effects that would be added later, so the actors had something real to react to.
Brian Cox Helped Cillian Murphy Realize Robert Capa
Cillian Murphy in Sunshine
Image Via Searchlight Pictures
Although the cast is ostensibly an ensemble, Capa is our primary point-of-view character. His voiceover provides the opening exposition, and he is the only character we see recording video messages to send home. Murphy spent extra time with Dr. Cox, even shadowing him as he worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva — home of the Large Hadron Collider — and sitting in on meetings. According to Cox, Murphy picked up mannerisms and speech patterns from the physicists around him, which show up in some of his improvised dialogue. In fact, the experience had such a profound effect on Murphy that it changed him from an agnostic to an atheist. “Not just because I spent time with these guys," he said in 2007. "They just confirmed what I’d always suspected."
Cox, who worked as a professional musician for the bands Dare and D:Ream while earning his Ph.D. in particle physics, often sports a band t-shirt under his blazer and doesn't look like a stereotypical physicist. The resemblance between Capa and Cox is unmistakable, from the shaggy hairstyle to the wiry build to the youthful handsomeness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Cox later praised Murphy's performance as "brilliant."
Capa’s demeanor — usually calm and grounded, but punctuated by moments of both dry humor and intense terror as everything goes to hell around him — is reminiscent of Murphy’s breakout performance in another Boyle-Garland collaboration, 28 Days Later. While the entire crew understands well the enormity and significance of their mission, only Capa truly grasps the power of the Manhattan-sized (an apt analogy) bomb they tow, as well as the sheer insanity of their plan to launch it into the sun and escape with their lives, protected only by the gigantic but far from indestructible gold leaf shield that stands between the Icarus II and instantaneous incineration. The weight of this knowledge hangs over Murphy's character, who is outwardly in control of his emotions, but perhaps just barely.
'Sunshine' Is Finally Getting the Appreciation It Deserves
Chris Evans and Cillian Murphy in Sunshine
Image Via Searchlight Pictures
Despite largely positive reviews, Sunshine flopped at the box office, failing to make back its $40 million budget, outshone by more fantastical franchise fare such as Spider-Man 3, Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Some have speculated that a summer release — which forced it to compete against the aforementioned blockbusters — was a mistake, particularly in the film's home base of Britain, where winter is the more popular season for theater-going. Others believe the film was too cerebral, and that extremely high-concept sci-fi à la 2001: A Space Odyssey just didn't have much of an audience in the late 2000s. Today, although it hasn't quite garnered a cult following, the film has gained greater appreciation as more and more fans of the genre discover it and fall in love with its cast, smart writing, and that beautiful, nerve-strumming tension.
Although Oppenheimer is set in the past rather than the future and is grounded firmly on Earth, Murphy's performance in it more than likely benefitted from his time spent working on Sunshine and learning from today's most brilliant physicists. As Danny Boyle knew, even a baseline understanding of the subject matter can help an actor add a level of nuance to their performance that wouldn't be possible if they were going into the role completely ignorant. I, for one, can't wait to see how Murphy brings that understanding to his portrayal of the Father of the Atomic Bomb in Oppenheimer, which hits theaters Friday, July 21.