One of the year’s biggest hits — and a surefire Oscar contender — is Oppenheimer, filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s three-hour epic, captured on sprawling 65 mm, about theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s stewardship of the Manhattan Project that created the world’s first atomic bomb, his anxiety over unleashing such a destructive force out into the world, and his subsequent persecution by the very U.S. government that had celebrated his WWII-ending monstrosity.
And it’s Irish actor Cillian Murphy, a frequent Nolan collaborator, who is tasked with embodying the film’s tortured protagonist, and he did so with such a fierce commitment to his craft that his own co-stars, including Robert Downey Jr. (who plays Lewis Strauss of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission), were left in awe.
“I have never witnessed a greater sacrifice by a lead actor in my career,” Downey Jr. told People of Murphy’s performance.
Murphy told Rolling Stone U.K. the screenplay to Oppenheimer was “the best script I ever read,” and that capturing Oppenheimer’s genius proved to be a considerable challenge.
“With that intellect — which I think can actually be a burden — you’re not seeing stuff in the normal plane that we do. Everything is multifaceted and about to collapse. It’d be a terrible way to buy milk or cut the grass, I’d say,” he offered.
On Nov. 21, Oppenheimer will be released on Blu-Ray, and is packed with never-before-seen extras. In this exclusive clip from the Blu-Ray, Murphy and the film’s stunt coordinator, George Cottle, reveal how dangerous one particular scene was involving Murphy’s Oppenheimer climbing a giant ladder to the bomb in the New Mexico desert as the wind ripped through him:
“Climbing the tower was fantastic because I remember that day, in the story, there’s meant to be a storm… and then a storm arrives. That’s typical Chris. He wills it into reality,” Murphy explains in the behind-the-scenes clip, adding of the ladder, “The whole thing was shaking.”
But Murphy, in classic fashion, may be underselling it. According to Cottle, things were far more treacherous than that.
“It was scary,” he attests. “It was a long way up, and he was in a suit with leather-soled shoes on.”
