Cillian Murphy is ready for Hollywood to re-invent the wheel on its press tours. “I just think it’s a broken model,” the Oppenheimer star told GQ in a cover story. “Everybody is so bored.”
Murphy admitted he was a bit relieved when the SAG-AFTRA strike prevented him from attending Oppenheimer‘s opening weekend. He also pointed to his film’s success — alongside Barbie, both films’ Barbenheimer trend set records at the box office last summer — as evidence that the press wouldn’t even have been necessary after all.
“Same was the case with Peaky Blinders,” Murphy continued of the show in which he played protagonist Thomas “Tommy” Shelby for the duration of the show’s six seasons. “The first three seasons there was no advertising, a tiny show on BBC Two; it just caught fire because people talked to each other about it.”
“It’s like Joanne Woodward said,” he added. “‘Acting is like sex — do it, don’t talk about it.’ ”
Murphy clarified that it’s not the premise of press that he dislikes, but the surface-level monotony it has become. “People always used to say to me, ‘He has reservations,’ or ‘He’s a difficult interviewee.’ Not really,” he said. “I love talking about work, about art. What I struggle with — and find unnecessary — and unhelpful about what I want to do, is: ‘Tell me about yourself…’”
On a related note, he also explained why he won’t take photos with fans on the street anymore. “Once I started [saying no],” he said, “it changed my life. I just think it’s better to say hello and have a little conversation. I tell that to a lot of people, you know, actor friends of mine, and they’re just like: I feel so bad. But you don’t need a photo record of everywhere you’ve been in a day.”
Murphy added that he’s not a big fan of watching himself. “Many of my films I haven’t seen,” he said. “I know that Johnny Depp would always say that, but it’s actually true. Generally, the ones I haven’t seen are the ones I hear are not good.”
One of the films he hasn’t seen is Red Eye. Murphy played a terrorist who traps a hotel manager (Rachel McAdams) in an assassination plot while aboard a red eye flight to Miami in the 2005 project. “I love Rachel McAdams, and we had fun making it,” Murphy said. “But I don’t think it’s a good movie. It’s a good, B movie.”
Nevertheless, Murphy is beloved by the ongoing fanbase of the film. “It’s crazy!” he said. “I think it’s the duality of it. It’s why I wanted to play it. That two thing. The nice guy and the bad guy in one. The only reason it appealed to me is you could do that…that turn, you know?”
“They say the nicest people sometimes make the best villains,” McAdams told GQ of Murphy’s performance.
This isn’t the first time he’s shared his thoughts on the film. In 2021, the actor told Uproxx he thought the movie was “schlocky” but still made sure to praise McAdams.
“Rachel McAdams is excellent in it, but I didn’t think I gave a very nuanced performance in it,” he said. “But, listen, if people love the movie then that’s great.”