All Christopher Nolan’s films featuring Cillian Murphy

Cillian Murphy’s starring role in Oppenheimer earned him his first Oscar last weekend, the Irishman scooping 2024′s Best Actor award for his portrayal of Robert Oppenheimer, the man credited as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’. Oppenheimer, which dominated the 96th Academy Awards, was Murphy’s sixth big-screen appearance under the direction of Christopher Nolan - but his first in a leading role.

Murphy’s successful alliance with Nolan, who won Best Director on Sunday as Oppenheimer racked up a total of seven golden statuettes, goes back two decades. “It’s been the wildest, most exhilarating, most creatively satisfying journey you’ve taken me on over the last 20 years,” the 47-year-old told Nolan in his Oscar acceptance speech. “I owe you more than I can say.”

Trio of Batman appearances

Murphy first featured in a Nolan movie in 2005′s Batman Begins - one of three Batman films in which the pair have worked together. He initially auditioned for the titular role - which went to Christian Bale - before being cast as the corrupt psychopharmacologist Dr Jonathan Crane (aka the supervillain Scarecrow).

Speaking to GQ magazine in July, Murphy said he has no regrets about missing out on playing Batman. “I think it was for the best because we got Christian Bale’s performance, which is a stunning interpretation of that role,” he declared. “I never considered myself as the right physical specimen for Batman. To me, it was always going to be Christian Bale.”

Murphy later reprised his role as Crane/Scarecrow in Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), although in both instances he was limited to more fleeting appearances.

Inception and Dunkirk

In between his second and third Batman films, Murphy appeared in Nolan’s 2010 sci-fi action picture Inception, about a group of thieves who use dream-sharing technology to infiltrate people’s minds and steal information. He played business empire heir Robert Fischer Jr, who is the group’s target: his father’s competitor has tasked them with invading Fischer’s subconscious and planting the idea in his mind that he should dissolve his family’s company.

In 2017, Murphy then had a small but noteworthy part as a shell-shocked soldier in the World War II movie Dunkirk, Nolan’s immersive, draining account of the 1940 evacuation of more than 300,000 Allied soldiers from northern France.

“I was desperate to play a lead for him”

Shortly before Oppenheimer’s release in July last year, Murphy told AP of the desire he had long harboured to finally snare a lead role in a Nolan picture. “I have always said publicly and privately, to Chris, that if I’m available and you want me to be in a movie, I’m there. I don’t really care about the size of the part,” he said. “But deep down, secretly, I was desperate to play a lead for him.”

Murphy added: “We have this long-standing understanding and trust and shorthand and respect. It felt like the right time to take on a bigger responsibility. And it just so happened that it was a [expletive] huge one.”

Meanwhile, one Nolan movie that Murphy was absent from, but would particularly like to have appeared in, is the 2014 space-travel epic Interstellar. “I adore Interstellar just because I find it so emotional,” he told The Independent last August. “I remember seeing it in the cinema when I had little kids. It just had a big impact on me. It broke my heart. I love watching his films when I’m not in them because you don’t have to freak out about the size of your ears, or whatever.”