Robert Downey Jr. Says Cillian Murphy's "Sacrifice" in Playing OPPENHEIMER Is Something He'd Never Seen in His Career

This past weekend was the opening of director Christopher Nolan’s historic epic, Oppenheimer. The film was packed with an incredible ensemble cast that includes Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who ran the Manhattan Project that led to the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II; Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer; Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project; Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission; Florence Pugh as psychiatrist Jean Tatlock; Benny Safdie as theoretical physicist Edward Teller; Michael Angarano as Robert Serber; Josh Hartnett plays pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence; Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Dane DeHaan, Dylan Arnold, David Krumholtz, Alden Ehrenreich, and Matthew Modine. 

The film was captivating and everyone did an amazing job, but none took on more in their role than Cillian Murphy. His co-star, Robert Downey Jr. sung his praises and talked about his commitment to playing the historic figure in a recent interview with Deadline, saying:

“I have never witnessed a greater sacrifice by a lead actor in my career. He knew it was going to be a behemoth ask when Chris called him. But I think he also had the humility that is required to survive playing a role like this. We’d be like, ‘Hey, we got a three-day weekend. Maybe we’ll go antiquing in Santa Fe. What are you going to do?’ ‘Oh, I have to learn 30,000 words of Dutch. Have a nice time.’ But that’s the nature of the ask.”

Murphy was committed to the role and also talked about his weight loss in keeping true to the subject he was personifying, telling IndieWire:

“It’s like you’re on this f*cking 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.”

The actor said that Oppenheimer alternated between cigarettes and pipes and modeled his behavior during filming, adding, “You become competitive with yourself a little bit which is not healthy. I don’t advise it.”

Murphy gave the performance of his career, and I assume this will win him the Oscar. If you haven’t seen it yet, Oppenheimer is playing in theaters everywhere.