Oscar winner and Meme man: Cillian Murphy celebrates 50th birthday

Irish actor Cillian Murphy turned 50 on May 25. In three decades in the profession, he played the main villain in the Batman trilogy, a gangster with PTSD and the father of the atomic bomb, and last year won an Oscar, becoming the first Irish actor in history to receive this award. All the details are in the Izvestia article.

From law to theater: how Murphy became an actor

Murphy grew up in Cork, Ireland's second largest city, in a family of teachers. My father taught Irish, and my mother taught French. His biography is unusual for a Hollywood actor: he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at University College Cork, spent a year there and dropped out.

In parallel with his studies, Murphy played in the rock band Sons of Mister Greenjeans - the name was taken from a song by Frank Zappa, whom he called one of his heroes. In an interview with ELLE magazine, he recalled that music was his "first love": as a child, he listened to traditional Irish sessions in pubs, then his father opened The Beatles to him. As a teenager, he seriously considered a musical career — until he got his first theatrical role in 1996.

According to the Irish Examiner, in 1996 he made his debut in the production of Disco Pigs, the story of two classmates with a non—standard own language of communication. The play received a theatrical tour of Ireland and the UK, then turned into a film. Murphy played in both. It was then that he was noticed.

"28 Days Later": The $8 Million Movie that made Him Famous

In 2002, Danny Boyle's horror film 28 Days Later was released. Murphy played Jim, a bicycle courier who wakes up from a coma in an empty London hospital, goes outside and discovers that humanity is almost extinct.

The film grossed $82 million on a budget of $8 million and became a cult hit before the end of its first weekend at the box office. Critics called Murphy the central figure of the narrative: not a typical action hero or a man with a gun in his hand, but an ordinary man who finds himself in circumstances that simultaneously break him and force him to reassemble himself. This is exactly what will distinguish his roles over the next 20 years.

Three years later, he appeared in Wes Craven's "Night Flight" and starred in Christopher Nolan. Then these two directors defined his career.

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Christopher Nolan: Six films and one Oscar

The first collaboration was Batman Begins (2005). Murphy auditioned for the role of Batman himself, didn't get it, and instead played Dr. Jonathan Crane, an Arkham psychiatrist using a hallucinogenic toxin. The Scarecrow's image was memorable with a minimum of screen time: glasses, a mask, and a look that does the rest for the director.

In "The Dark Knight" (2008), "The Beginning" (2010), "The Dark Knight: In The Renaissance" (2012) and "Dunkirk" (2017), he appeared in different roles. Nolan once explained this in an interview simply: when he thinks about a character, he often thinks about Murphy. This is not so much a compliment to a specific role as a characteristic of the acting method.

"Sharp visors" — Tommy Shelby and 18 thousand cigarettes

The BBC series Peaky Blinders was released in 2013 with the story of the Shelby gangster family in post-war Birmingham of the 1920s. Murphy played Tommy Shelby, a World War I veteran who returned from the war a completely different person and built something cold and very precise out of this breakdown for his own purposes.

The character turned out to be complicated: Shelby is not a villain in the usual sense and not a hero. He is a man inside whom something once irreversibly changed, and with this burden he continues to live in silence, without complaints and attempts to justify himself. Murphy worked with him for six consecutive seasons, from 2013 to 2022. During this time, the series has grown into a cultural phenomenon, especially after appearing on Netflix.

Murphy received a BAFTA nomination for his role as Tommy Shelby. It didn't end with an award, but it did end with "The Immortal Man": in March 2026, the feature film Peaky Blinders was released on Netflix.: The Immortal Man, where Murphy is back as Shelby.

Cigarettes are a separate story. Tommy Shelby smokes all the time. Murphy doesn't smoke in real life. During the nine years of filming, he smoked, according to EarlyGame, about 18 thousand herbal cigarettes — the producers calculated it themselves. The figure turned out to be round and weighty: two years of continuous smoking, if you count a pack a day.

Oppenheimer wins the Oscar and is the first Irishman in the history of the award.

In July 2023, Nolan released Oppenheimer, a three—hour biography of physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who led the development of the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. The film is arranged non-linearly: two timelines, government hearings and scenes in the New Mexico desert, where weapons capable of destroying the planet were created.

Oppenheimer Murphy is neither a triumphant nor a villain. This is a man who realized exactly what he created, and lives with this knowledge until the end of the film. According to Park Magazine NY, Murphy spent several months studying quantum physics for the role in Oppenheimer, read Oppenheimer's letters and diaries, and lost a lot of weight in order to achieve the desired exhausted look of a man carrying too heavy a load.

The film grossed $975.8 million worldwide. In March 2024, Murphy won the Oscar for Best Actor. Additionally— the Golden Globe, BAFTA and SAG Award. Four major film awards of the season for one role.

The significance of the award goes beyond his personal career: Murphy became the first Irish actor in history to be awarded the Oscar for Best Actor. None of his countrymen had achieved this before him.

"The Little Things of life": the choice after the Oscar

After Oppenheimer, Murphy had the opportunity to star in anything. He chose Small Things Like These— a quiet Irish drama based on the novel by Claire Keegan. The film was released at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2024.

Murphy acted not only as an actor, but also as a co-producer of the film. The story is intentionally simple, and this makes it even more difficult: in a small Irish town in 1985, a coal merchant accidentally finds out that the local monastery has a correctional home for women who were sent there by their families "to atone for their shame." Without large—scale scenes and entertainment, there is only a moral choice between pretending that nothing is happening, or still facing the truth.

The film received restrained reviews at the start, but over time it firmly occupied a place in conversations about Irish cinema in recent years. Murphy purposefully chooses projects where history is more important than budget. "The little things of life" is the most obvious confirmation of this.

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