I was lucky enough to go to a talkback with Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt for Oppenheimer this week, and one of the greatest things I learned was that Murphy doesn’t like talking about acting. Relatable, king!
At a screening of Oppenheimer in IMAX 70mm, Blunt and Murphy were there to do a Q&A with Bilge Ebiri, a journalist who has written for Vulture and NY Magazine. While Ebiri was asking questions about Murphy’s process for bringing J. Robert Oppenheimer to life in the epic film and Murphy was talking to a room filmed with critics, actors, directors, and other guild members, he said one of the most relatable things yet: “Fuck, talking about acting is so boring.”
The reality is … he’s not wrong. As a person with an acting degree, talking about the acting process is boring because it is a very individual thing, and you are often blowing smoke up your own ass. So Murphy noting that made me love him that much more. This called back to another great recent moment from Murphy’s.
At another Q&A, he was talking about what he did hope to cope during the SAG-AFTRA strike. What did he do? Well he spent the time “staying at home, eating cheese”—again, relatable! What’s so funny about the entire situation is that this is a man who wants to do his job and then move along, and that’s why Murphy is so great.
Cillian Murphy clearly wants to eat cheese, watch movies, and not talk about acting.
Asking actors questions about their craft can get tedious. It is either a very heady process or it is something that they just don’t want to talk about. So when you’re doing things like a press junket or even just talking to someone about a movie after its release, like this at a Q&A, it is relatable to hear someone like Cillian Murphy say that talking about acting is “boring.” What was so funny to me was that he said it multiple times.
Every time he started to talk about the movie, he started to just get into how boring he thought talking about acting was. Because, let me talk about acting for a second: Some of us have notebooks of work where we write down our research and our “inspirations” for things and it is all deeply personal and no one wants to really share that anyway. So it is just genuinely funny to me to watch Murphy just flat out say that it’s boring to him. This honestly makes me happy and between this and the cheese, I’m just waiting for the next thing he’s going to admit.
Still, watching him talk about his work was great, and seeing him with Emily Blunt, the two talking about working together on this and A Quiet Place: Part II, was very fun, and just an overall wonderful experience.
(featured image: Samir Hussein/WireImage)
