Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, starring his frequent collaborator Cillian Murphy as Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, has had outstanding success at the box office for a three-hour biopic, grossing over $953 million worldwide (and counting!) Though the film’s entire ensemble cast has received substantial praise, particular focus has been on Murphy’s portrayal of the so-called “father of the atomic bomb.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Murphy spoke about portraying Oppenheimer in the film, including absorbing some of the physicist’s personal habits.
Murphy denies what he was doing in the film constituted method acting (Murphy even remarked to the interviewer, “Method acting is a sort of … No”). However, Murphy admits that he became so focused on portraying Oppenheimer that he began to operate at the heightened level that the famed scientist did. He explains, “It’s like you’re on this f***ing train that’s just bombing. It’s bang, bang, bang, bang. You sleep for a few hours, get up, bang it again. I was running on crazy energy; I went over a threshold to where I was not worrying about food or anything. I was so in it, a state of hyper … hyper something. But it was good because the character was like that. He never ate.”
