1996–2002: Theatre work breakthrough and early roles Murphy pressured Pat Kiernan until he got an audition at
Corcadorca Theatre Company, and in September 1996, he made his professional acting debut on the stage, playing the part of a volatile Cork teenager in
Enda Walsh's
Disco Pigs. Originally intended to run for three weeks in Cork, In 2023, Murphy went on to call this moment in time pivotal: "It all happened to me in one month, in August '96: (my band) got offered a record deal, I failed my law exams, I got the part in
Disco Pigs, and I met my wife. I now look back and go, 'Oh, shit, I didn't know then how important all these things were' - the sort of domino effect that they would have on my life ... I love the chaos and the randomness. I love the beauty of the unexpected." He proceeded to star in many other theatre productions, including
Shakespeare's
Much Ado About Nothing (1998),
The Country Boy, and
Juno and the Paycock (both 1999). At the turn of the 21st century, he began appearing in independent films such as
On the Edge (2001), and in
short films, including
Filleann an Feall (2000) and
Watchmen (2001). He also reprised his role for the film adaption of
Disco Pigs (2001) and appeared in the
BBC television mini-series adaptation of
The Way We Live Now. During this period, he moved from Cork, relocating first to
Dublin for a few years, then to London in 2001. In 2002, Murphy starred as Adam in a theatre production of
Neil LaBute's
The Shape of Things at the
Gate Theatre in Dublin. Writing for
The Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole praised Murphy's performance, "Murphy measures out his metamorphosis with an impressive subtlety and intelligence".
2002–2004: 28 Days Later and breakthrough Murphy was cast in the lead role in
Danny Boyle's horror film
28 Days Later (2002). He portrayed
pandemic survivor
Jim, who is "perplexed to find himself alone in the desolate, post-apocalyptic world" after waking from a coma in a London hospital. Casting director Gail Stevens suggested that Boyle audition Murphy for the role, having been impressed with his performance in
Disco Pigs. Stevens stated that it was only after seeing his slender physique during filming that they decided to feature him fully nude at the beginning of the film. She recalled that Murphy was shy on set with the tendency to look slightly away from the camera, but enthused that he had a "dreamy, slightly de-energised, floating quality that is fantastic for the film". Released in the UK in late 2002, by the following July,
28 Days Later had become a
sleeper hit in North America, and success worldwide, putting Murphy in front of a mass audience for the first time. His performance earned him a nomination for Best Newcomer at the
8th Empire Awards, and Breakthrough Male Performance at the
2004 MTV Movie Awards. Murphy professed that he considered the film to be much deeper than a zombie or horror film, expressing surprise at the film's success, and that American audiences responded well to its content and violence. In 2003, Murphy played the role of Konstantine in a stage production of
Chekhov's
The Seagull at the
Edinburgh International Festival. He said that he wanted to play Konstantine because the character "goes on this amazing journey through the play [...] he comes to realise there's no point being an iconoclastic writer just for the sake of it, and that the search for new forms has to have something behind it". Murphy starred as a lovelorn, hapless supermarket stocker who plots a bank heist with
Colin Farrell in
Intermission (2003), which became the highest-grossing Irish independent film in Irish box office history (until
The Wind That Shakes the Barley broke the record in 2006). Reflecting on his roles in
28 Days Later and the "sad-sack Dublin shelf-stacker" in
Intermission, Sarah Lyall of the
International Herald Tribune stated that Murphy brought "fluent ease to the roles he takes on, a graceful and wholly believable intensity. His delicate good looks have, as much as his acting prowess, caused people to mark him as Ireland's next
Colin Farrell, albeit one who seems less likely to be caught tomcatting around or brawling drunkenly at premieres." He had a minor supporting role in the successful Hollywood period drama
Cold Mountain (2003). He portrayed a deserting soldier who shares a grim scene with
Jude Law's character, and was on location in Romania for only a week. Murphy stated that it was a "massive production", remarking that director
Anthony Minghella was the calmest director he had ever met. Murphy also had a role as a butcher in
Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) with
Scarlett Johansson and
Colin Firth. In 2004, Murphy toured Ireland with the
Druid Theatre Company, in
The Playboy of the Western World (playing the character of Christy Mahon) under the direction of
Garry Hynes—who had previously directed Murphy back in 1999 in the theatre productions of
Juno and the Paycock—and also in
The Country Boy.
2005–2006: Villainous roles and critical success |left Murphy appeared as
Dr. Jonathan Crane in
Christopher Nolan's
Batman Begins (2005). Originally asked to audition for the role of
Bruce Wayne/Batman, Murphy never saw himself as having the right physique for the superhero, but leapt at the chance to connect with director Nolan. He starred as Jackson Rippner, who terrorises
Rachel McAdams on an overnight flight in
Wes Craven's thriller,
Red Eye (2005).
The New York Times film critic
Manohla Dargis asserted that Murphy made "a picture-perfect villain" and that his "baby blues look cold enough to freeze water and his wolfish leer suggests its own terrors". The film was favourably reviewed and earned almost $100 million worldwide. Murphy received several awards nominations for his 2005 villainous roles, among them a nomination as Best Villain at the
2006 MTV Movie Awards for
Batman Begins.
Entertainment Weekly ranked him among its 2005 "Summer
MVPs", a cover story list of 10 entertainers with outstanding breakthrough performances.
The New Yorkers
David Denby wrote: "Cillian Murphy, who has angelic looks that can turn sinister, is one of the most elegantly seductive monsters in recent movies." Murphy starred as Patrick/"Kitten" Braden, a
transgender Irish woman in search of her mother, in
Neil Jordan's comedy-drama
Breakfast on Pluto (2005), based on the novel of the same title by
Patrick McCabe. and
Roger Ebert noted the way that Murphy played the character with a "bemused and hopeful voice". While lukewarm reviews of
Breakfast on Pluto tended to praise Murphy's performance highly, a few critics dissented:
The Village Voice, which panned the film, found him "unconvincing" and overly cute. Murphy was nominated for a
Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for
Breakfast on Pluto and won the fourth
Irish Film and Television Academy Best Actor Award.
Premiere magazine cited his performance as Kitten in their "The 24 Finest Performances of 2005" feature. Murphy was especially keen on appearing in the film due to his intimate connections to
Cork, Ireland, where the film was shot. Murphy auditioned six times for the role of Damien O'Donovan, a young doctor turned revolutionary, before winning the part. Murphy considered it a very special privilege to have been given the role and stated that he was "tremendously proud" of the film, remarking that the "memories run very, very deep – the politics, the divisions and everybody has stories of family members who were caught up in the struggle." David Denby noted Murphy's moments of deep stillness and idiosyncrasies in portraying the character.
Kenneth Turan of the
Los Angeles Times wrote that "Murphy is especially good at playing the zealotry as well as the soul-searching and the regret, at showing us a man who is eaten up alive because he's forced to act in ways that are contrary to his background and his training".
GQ magazine presented Murphy with its 2006 Actor of the Year award for his work in
The Wind That Shakes the Barley.
2006–2012: Further theatre and film roles '' in 2010 Murphy returned to the stage starring opposite
Neve Campbell at the
New Ambassadors Theatre in London's West End from November 2006 to February 2007, playing the lead role of John Kolvenbach's play
Love Song.
Theatre Record described his character of Beane as a "winsomely cranky" mentally unstable "sentimentalised lonely hero", noting how he magnetically, with "all blue eyes and twitching hands", moves "comically from painfully shy "wallpaper" to garrulous, amorous male".
Variety magazine considered his performance to be "as magnetic onstage as onscreen", remarking that his "unhurried puzzlement pulls the slight preciousness in the character's idiot-savant naivete back from the brink". He starred in the science fiction film
Sunshine (2007) as a physicist-astronaut charged with re-igniting the sun, also directed by
Danny Boyle. He starred opposite
Lucy Liu in
Paul Soter's romantic comedy
Watching the Detectives (2007); the
indie film premiered at the 2007
Tribeca Film Festival and was released direct-to-DVD. Murphy starred as
Richard Neville, editor of the psychedelic radical underground magazine
Oz in the film
Hippie Hippie Shake, which was filmed in 2007, but the project, much delayed, was eventually shelved in 2011. Murphy made a brief re-appearance as the Scarecrow in Nolan's
The Dark Knight (2008), the sequel to
Batman Begins, before starring in
The Edge of Love—about a love quadrangle involving the poet
Dylan Thomas—with
Keira Knightley,
Sienna Miller and
Matthew Rhys. In July 2008, Murphy made a debut appearance in another medium—on a postage stamp; the Irish Post Office,
An Post, released a series of four stamps paying homage to the creativity of films recently produced in Ireland, including one featuring Murphy in a still from
The Wind That Shakes the Barley. In 2009, Murphy starred opposite rock singer
Feist and actor
David Fox in
The Water, directed by
Kevin Drew of
Broken Social Scene. The 15-minute Canadian short film, released online in April 2009, is nearly silent until the Feist song of the same title plays close to the end. Murphy was attracted to the role as a fan of Broken Social Scene and the prospect of making a silent movie, which he considered to be the "hardest test for any actor". Murphy also starred in ''
Perrier's Bounty, a crime dramedy from the makers of Intermission'', in which he portrayed a petty criminal on the run from a gangster played by
Brendan Gleeson. In 2010, he made a return to theatre in
From Galway to Broadway and back again, which was a stage show that celebrated the
Druid Theatre Company's 35th birthday. The direct-to-video psychological thriller
Peacock (2010), co-starring
Elliot Page,
Susan Sarandon and
Bill Pullman, starred Murphy as a man with a split personality who fools people into believing he is also his own wife. Christian Toto of
The Washington Times referred to the film as "a handsomely mounted psychological drama with an arresting lead turn by Cillian Murphy", and noted that although Murphy was not a stranger to playing in drag, his work in the film set a "new standard for gender-bending performances". Murphy next starred in
Christopher Nolan's
Inception (2010), playing entrepreneur Robert Fischer, whose mind is infiltrated by DiCaprio's character Cobb to convince him to dissolve his business. That year, Murphy also made an uncredited
cameo as programmer Edward Dillinger Jr., son of original
Tron antagonist Ed Dillinger (
David Warner) in
Tron: Legacy. In 2011, Murphy performed in the stage
monodrama Misterman, written and directed by
Enda Walsh, with whom he had previously worked on
Disco Pigs. The production was initially staged in
Galway and was taken to
St. Ann's Warehouse in
Brooklyn, New York. Murphy said of the role, "The live nature of it makes it so dangerous. You're only there because of the goodwill of the audience, and that's compounded by its being a one-man show." Sarah Lyall of the
International Herald Tribune described Murphy's character Thomas Magill to be a "complicated mixture of sympathetic and not nice at all – deeply wounded, but with a dangerous, skewed moral code", praising his ability to mimic wickedly. Lyall noted Murphy's "unusual ability to create and inhabit creepy yet fascinating characters from the big screen to the small stage in the intense one-man show
Misterman", and documented that on one evening the "theatre was flooded, not with applause but with silence", eventually culminating in a standing ovation at his powerful performance. He played the lead in the British horror film
Retreat (2011), which had a
limited release. He also appeared in the science fiction film
In Time (2011), starring
Justin Timberlake and
Amanda Seyfried, which was poorly reviewed. Murphy starred in
Red Lights (2012) with
Robert De Niro and
Sigourney Weaver. He played Tom Buckley, the assistant to Weaver's character who is a paranormal investigator. Murphy considered working with De Niro to have been one of the most intimidating moments in his career. He remarked: "My first scene when I come to visit him my character is supposed to be terrified and intimidated. There was no acting involved. The man has presence. You can't act presence. I'll never have that. Watching him use it... when you put a camera on it, it just becomes something else." The film was panned by critics and under-performed at the box office. Murphy went on to reprise his role as the Scarecrow for the third time in
The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and had a supporting role as Mike in the British independent film
Broken (2012). His performance earned him a
British Independent Film Award for Best Supporting Actor nomination.
2013–present: Peaky Blinders and Oppenheimer Beginning in 2013, Murphy starred as
Thomas Shelby in the BBC television series
Peaky Blinders, a series about a criminal gang in
Birmingham during the post-
World War I period.
Jason Statham was initially picked for the role by director
Steven Knight, who met both actors to talk about the role. Knight later said, "Cillian, when you meet him, isn't Tommy, obviously, but I was stupid enough not to understand that".
Peaky Blinders was praised and received high ratings. A second series began broadcasting on the BBC in October 2014. On 25 August 2019, the first episode of season 5 was broadcast on
BBC One. In an interview with
Digital Spy, director Anthony Byrne said, "if we did start shooting in January (2021), we wouldn't finish until May or June and then it's another 6 months of editing". Series six premiered on 27 February 2022. In 2013, Murphy made his directorial debut with a music video for the band
Money's single
Hold Me Forever. The video features dancers from the
English National Ballet and was filmed at
The Old Vic Theatre in London. In 2014, Murphy starred in the drama
Aloft, and
Wally Pfister's
Transcendence. Both of these garnered mostly unfavourable critic reviews according to the aggregator
Rotten Tomatoes. That same year, Murphy reunited with Enda Walsh in the play
Ballyturk. He starred in
Ron Howard's 2015 film
In the Heart of the Sea. In 2015, he contributed spoken vocals to the tracks "8:58" and "The Clock" from
Paul Hartnoll's album
8:58. The two previously met while Hartnoll was scoring the second season of
Peaky Blinders. In 2016, Murphy starred in Ben Wheatley's
Free Fire, and appeared in
Anthropoid, in which he portrayed Czechoslovak
World War II army soldier
Jozef Gabčík, who was involved in
Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of
Reinhard Heydrich. Rupert Hawksley of
The Telegraph said that Murphy's performance in
Anthropoid was "solid, if unremarkable" and that he was "not asked to do an awful lot, other than smoke and look perplexed". In 2017, Murphy played a
shell-shocked army officer who is recovered from a wrecked ship in
Christopher Nolan's war film
Dunkirk, which emerged as a critical and box-office success. He felt that his character, who is nameless and was credited simply as Shivering Soldier, was "representative of something experienced by thousands of soldiers, which is the profound emotional and psychological toll that war can have". Murphy has also played a role in the feature film
Anna as Miller, released in June 2019. His next release,
A Quiet Place Part II (2021), stars Murphy as Emmett, a hardened survivor and old family friend of the Abbotts. Murphy's character reluctantly takes in the Abbotts following the events of
the first film.
Peter Bradshaw of
The Guardian praised his performance. at the
Berlinale in 2017 Since 2020, Murphy has hosted ''Cillian Murphy's Limited Edition
, a limited-run radio series broadcasting on BBC Radio 6 Music in which he draws from his personal music collection and answers "reasonable questions" from listeners. As of 2024, three seasons of Limited Edition'' have been produced, totalling 28 episodes. Murphy portrayed
J. Robert Oppenheimer in the biographical thriller
Oppenheimer, released in 2023. The film marks the sixth collaboration between Nolan and Murphy, and the first starring Murphy as the lead. To prepare for the role, Murphy lost a significant amount of weight to match Oppenheimer's near-emaciated appearance, extensively researched Oppenheimer's life and took inspiration from
David Bowie's appearance in the 1970s. Murphy's performance was lauded, with
Empire's Dan Jolin writing: "At the film's pulsing nucleus is Murphy as Oppenheimer, and he is compelling throughout." For his performance, he won the
Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama, the
BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, the
Actor Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, and the
Academy Award for Best Actor. He was the
first Irish-born performer to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. Murphy launched the independent production company Big Things Films with
Alan Moloney in February 2024. He produced and starred in the historical drama
Small Things like These, which opened the
74th Berlin International Film Festival, and the drama film
Steve, through a collaboration with
Netflix. Murphy executive produced two of the sequels to
28 Days Later, titled
28 Years Later and
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, reprising his role as Jim in the latter. In 2026, Murphy reprised his role as Shelby in the film
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, which served as a continuation of the
Peaky Blinders series. ==Public image==