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"Cillian Murphy, who has angelic looks that can turn sinister, is one of the most elegantly seductive monsters in recent movies."
David Denby, The New Yorker review of Red Eye

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Cillian Murphy (born May 25, 1976 in Douglas, Ireland) is an Academy Award-winning Irish actor.

He began his acting career in 1996, working on several stage productions, and started appearing in films in the early 2000s. His breakthrough role is widely considered to be 2002's 28 Days Later, where he played the main character, the apocalypse survivor Jim.

He's known mostly for three things. First, his chameleon-like ability to adapt to a wide variety of roles and inhabit them. Second, his amazingly blue eyes, and third, being extremely pretty. He started his career in entertainment as a rock musician. Since Batman Begins, he is a regular collaborator of Christopher Nolan, with their 2023 collaboration Oppenheimer winning him an Oscar for his role as the title character.

Cillian is a rather private fellow, and he doesn't normally discuss his personal life in interviews. He is married to visual artist Yvonne McGuiness, and they have two sons, Malachy and Aran.


His roles include:

He provides examples of:

  • Actor Allusion: In two Christopher Nolan movies he's starred in - Batman Begins and Inception he has a bag put over his head.
  • Actor-Inspired Element: Jim of 28 Days Later was written to be English but Danny Boyle made him Irish to accommodate Cillian.
  • Cast the Runner-Up: He auditioned for Batman in Batman Begins but lost to Christian Bale. Nolan thought he wasn't right physically, but was so impressed by the audition that he asked him to play the Scarecrow.
  • Celebrity Is Overrated: He's made clear that he has little to no interest in fame and finds the hype around celebrities tedious and so stays out of the spotlight as much as possible.
  • Creepy Blue Eyes: On occasion, his striking blue eyes are used in this manner, most notably in Red Eye where his eyes were even what convinced Wes Craven to cast him.
  • Doing It for the Art: He has said this is the Number One reason he does many of his films and he almost never does it for money.
  • Dyeing for Your Art: For certain roles, he's often lost and gained weight to look convincing as a certain character.
    • For Sunshine, he underwent astronaut and stunt training, along with taking certain science courses to get into his physicist character.
    • For Breakfast on Pluto, he often hung out with transgender people and did research on women's beauty regimens.
    • For Peaky Blinders, he shaved his head into the signature hairstyle of Tommy Shelby and hit the gym to put on 15 pounds of muscle. He's quite vocal about how much he hates the hairstyle, which may be why later seasons started to tone it down a little bit.
    • Also adopted a buzzcut for 28 Days Later, as Jim gets an Important Haircut midway through.
    • For Dunkirk he did a lot of research into post-traumatic stress disorder, including talking to people who actually suffer from it.
  • Enforced Method Acting: Sunshine saw the cast preparing for their roles by rooming together. Cillian left every night to see his pregnant wife, and this helped convey that Capa was somewhat of an outsider to the crew (Word of God saying he's the only character not to be a trained astronaut).
  • Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: A few of his roles, most notably Jackson Rippner and Scarecrow, make a point of contrasting his striking, androgynous good looks with his characters' depravity and sadism.
  • Fake American: In quite a few of his roles, a.o. in Batman Begins, Red Eye, Sunshine, Inception note  and Red Lights. He does the accent very well, considering how notoriously hard the Irish Accent is to shed. He was even skilled enough to fool casting directors who were shocked to find out afterwards that he wasn't really American. He also successfully adopted J. Robert Oppenheimer's more old-fashioned American accent for Oppenheimer.
  • Fake Brit:
    • 28 Days Later started out with his character Jim being written as a Brit, but because he struggled with the accent, Jim was changed to be Irish instead so he could keep his natural accent.
    • His Birmingham accent in Peaky Blinders was shaky during the first season, but spot-on in season two.
    • He has a more traditional example of this trope in Dunkirk, with the southern English accent.
  • Hollywood Hype Machine: An example that went out of his way not to live too much up to it. In the mid-2000s, thanks to his roles in Batman Begins, Red Eye and Breakfast on Pluto (which got him a Golden Globe nomination), he was touted as a "big star in the making". But between his discomfort with the Hollywood system and celebrity culture, as well as his annoyance with being approached solely for playing villainous roles, he's preferred to stay out of the spotlight and take up roles in smaller-scale productions (unless he gets a call from Christopher Nolan).
  • Icy Blue Eyes: Just look at the page picture! His eyes stand out even more when his face is covered with his Scarecrow mask in Batman Begins (see the 2nd character picture in the Scarecrow folder on the character page.
    • Matt Damon said it was really hard doing scene work with him for Oppenheimer because "sometimes you find yourself just swimming in his eyes."
  • Production Posse:
  • Playing Against Type: He starred opposite Lucy Liu in the romantic comedy Watching the Detectives at a time when his mainstream success was due to being typecast as creepy villains.
  • Promoted Fanboy: He's stated he was a big fan of the first TRON movie. He later got a cameo in TRON: Legacy.
  • Reclusive Artist: He’s very private and doesn’t give many interviews. He lives in Dublin and not London, eschews social media, and lives a normal life. It’s known he’s married and has two sons but his wife isn’t famous and his sons have only been publicly photographed a few times.
  • Self-Deprecation:
    • When asked how he would've portrayed Batman, he laughed and said, "Come on, do I really look like Batman material to you?"
    • According to one fan that met him, she complimented him and called him attractive, earning her a look of surprise from him.
  • Soft-Spoken Sadist: Very skilled at these roles, with his most famous being Red Eye and Batman Begins. Although he's since sworn off villainous roles to avoid being typecast.
  • Star-Making Role: 28 Days Later got the ball rolling, and Red Eye and Batman Begins catapulted him to household name status.
  • Typecasting:
    • After Batman Begins and Red Eye came out in the same year and became Star Making Roles for him, he became best known to mainstream movie goers for playing incredibly creepy villains. He's sworn off playing villains (antiheroes like Tommy Shelby don't count) again, however, in the hopes of averting this.
    • Meanwhile, in most of his more independent productions, he's known for playing everyman type characters.
  • What Beautiful Eyes!: His stunning, bright blue eyes are his most striking feature, and are often mentioned by fans and press alike. Christopher Nolan admitted he kept finding excuses to have Crane take off his glasses during Batman Begins just to emphasize them more.

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