Cillian Murphy is one of the most versatile actors of his generation, but he draws the line when it comes to taking photos with his fans.
“I just think it’s better to say hello, and have a little conversation,” Murphy, 47, told GQ in his March 2024 cover story published online on Tuesday, February 13. “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 insisted that the hard and fast rule has “changed my life,” but it’s not the first time he’s expressed his dislike for attracting attention off screen.
“I really don’t go out much,” he told The Observer in 2022. “And people are so underwhelmed when they encounter me, so I’m very happy with that. And I’m always happy to chat. What I don’t like is people surreptitiously taking photographs.”
Murphy, who is nominated for Best Actor at the 2024 Oscars for his Oppenheimer performance, has spoken candidly about how he prepared for the role of the titular theoretical physicist.
To fully transform into his character, Murphy lost a ton of weight. “You become competitive with yourself a little bit which is not healthy. I don’t advise it,” he explained to The Guardian in a July 2023 interview, adding that he won’t say how many pounds he shed. “Ach, no. I don’t want it to be, ‘Cillian lost x weight for the part.’”
Cillian Murphy in “Peaky Blinders” www.robertviglasky.com
Murphy continued: “It’s like you’re on this f—king 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 something. But it was good because the character was like that. He never ate.”
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That same month, Murphy detailed his diligence in an interview with GQ. “There was a responsibility that I felt about playing the part. That’s just the way I work,” he said of skipping cast dinners to focus on work. “I get very consumed by the work, and I don’t really have time for hanging out. And in this movie, I was [regularly] skipping dinner, you know, so I wasn’t a great craic to hang out with. But that’s just the way it was. It’s just the nature of the work.”
Along with securing an Oscar nod for Oppenheimer, Murphy won Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Drama at the 2024 Golden Globes last month and received nominations at the 2024 Critics’ Choice Movie Awards and the 2024 Screen Actors Guild Awards.