Cillian Murphy, who is the leading man in the recently-released Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, revealed a key detail about the script which he had never seen before.
In an interview with Collider, which took place before the SAG-AFTRA strike, the Peaky Blindersstar, 47, revealed that the screenplay was in first person when it is usually written in the third.
“[Nolan wrote the script in first-person, which I’d never encountered and never experienced,” Murphy told the outlet. “It blew my mind.”
He added that the writing became all the more impactful that way.
“It was one of the best screenplays I’ve ever read, without a shadow of a doubt. For example, he wouldn’t say, ‘Oppenheimer walks into the room and speaks to Strauss.’ He would say, ‘I walk into the room,’ and ‘I walk over and speak to Strauss.’ That’s how it was written.”
Nolan had previously shared with the New York Times that he felt the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who created the first atomic bomb in 1945 during World War II, is the most important story that should be told. Therefore, his script also resonated with that.
Murphy further explained that he realised “a huge responsibility because everything is kind of subjectively through Oppenheimer’s eyes, except for the black and white bits which are objectively from [Lewis] Strauss’ (Robert Downey Jr.) point of view.”
The acclaimed director has put forward many interesting projects such as Tenet and Dunkirk, and even delved into the superhero genre with the Dark Knight trilogy, all of which featured Murphy.