Cillian Murphy slimmed down to play the troubled father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming costume piece.
Murphy, who skipped ensemble cast dinners according to co-star Emily Blunt, revealed to The Guardian that sometimes she forgot to eat altogether.
“It’s like I’m on this fucking train that’s just bombing. It’s bang, bang, bang, bang. Sleep for a few hours, get up, bang it again,” Murphy said of her marathon performance. “I was running with crazy energy; I crossed a threshold where I didn’t care about food or anything. state of hyper something. But it was cool because the character was like that. He has never eaten.
Murphy noted that the real Oppenheimer survived on “cigarettes and pipes, he would alternate between the two”, before dying of cancer in 1967. To play “Oppenheimer’s” scientist, Murphy was determined to appear life-like- person of life as possible, complete with a “pig’s hat and pipe”.
“You get a little bit competitive with yourself, which isn’t healthy,” Murphy said. “I don’t recommend it.”
Without revealing how much she lost for the role, Murphy added, “I don’t want it to be, ‘Cillian lost x weight for the part.’”
Said the “Batman Begins” alum. a previous interview with the New York Times, “I love acting with my body, and Oppenheimer had a very distinct physique and silhouette, which I wanted to get right. I had to lose a lot of weight and we worked with costume and tailoring; he was very thin, almost emaciated, he lived on martinis and cigarettes. He added, “He had these really bright eyes and I wanted to give him this wide-eyed look, so we did a lot of work on his silhouette and his expressions before we started.”
