Cillian Murphy Offers Intriguing Answer On Whether Oppenheimer Is A Hero Or Villain

Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy addresses whether his titular character is a hero or a villain, offering up a thoughtful response. Serving as an adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus, Christopher Nolan’s latest film chronicles the life and career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist widely credited as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Murphy takes on the leading role in the movie, and his performance has been widely praised.

In a recent interview with Gold Derby on YouTube, Murphy shares an intriguing response to the question of whether he approached Oppenheimer as a heroic figure or a villainous one. The actor explains, however, that he didn’t take such a binary approach with the character. Check out Murphy’s full comment below:

“I don’t ever make those types of decisions playing any character. I never put them into any category, good, bad, or different, I just try to understand them. I just try to figure them out. He was so multi-faceted, so complex, so contradictory, it was a joy to play him. It was quite terrifying at the beginning. And he is such an iconic real-life figure. I’d never played somebody who was so well known.

“What I learned at the end is that I think he was intensely human, which is a great thing to play, because he was so flawed. It was so huge that I just had to go at it bit by bit, just go at it slowly and carefully and with a lot of consideration and sensitivity and empathy. Which is what I always do, but even more so on this one because he is, as you say, quite divisive.

“And we all live in Oppenheimer’s world now, we all live in the nuclear age because of what happened in ’45. There’s no denying that.”

Oppenheimer Presents A Nuanced Portrait Of The Man

Due in large part to the exhaustive portrayal of Oppenheimer featured in American Prometheus, Nolan’s film is able to capture much of this complexity that Murphy is referring to. One of the first scenes in the movie, after all, is of Oppenheimer poisoning his professor’s apple with potassium cyanide after being treated poorly by him, only to steal the apple back just before visiting scientist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) can eat it.

Nolan’s film doesn’t shy away from showing the theoretical physicist’s flaws and the less glamorous aspects of his life, which is part of why the movie is so effective. A major story point, for example, is Oppenheimer’s relationship with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and this relationship’s complicated intersection with his marriage to Kitty (Emily Blunt).

The film also spends a great deal of its runtime exploring the guilt Oppenheimer feels over the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the bomb’s creation leads to the end of World War II, it also causes the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, something that evidently takes a toll on the scientist. As is hammered home by Oppenheimer‘s ending scene, the man and his creation forever changed the world. Designations like “hero” or “villain,” as Murphy suggests, are far too simple for such a figure, and Nolan is able to effectively capture this in his film.