Cillian Murphy on the Brain-Drain of Playing Oppenheimer: ‘Being That Brilliant Is a Burden’

From the start, there was something weird about the script for Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” Cillian Murphy noticed it as soon as he began reading in Nolan’s hotel room in London: All of the directions were in the first person. It wasn’t “He sits down at the desk,” it was “I sit down at the desk.” The I, in this case, was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist and “father of the atomic bomb” that Nolan was asking Murphy to play.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said the Irish actor who won a Golden Globe for his performance in the film. “I don’t know if it’s ever been done before.