Oppenheimer's Cillian Murphy is this week's Radio Times cover star
The Peaky Blinders star on playing the father of the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer – and paying the price of fame.
Peaky Blinders became such a huge hit, transcending television to cross into the worlds of music, fashion and even dance, that it's difficult to recall its origins as a low-key drama about Birmingham gangsters. And it's also difficult to recall that its star Cillian Murphy had a career before he played Tommy Shelby, much of it on the big screen.
Now Murphy is back in the cinema with the release of the film Oppenheimer, telling the story of the father of the atomic bomb and what happened to him after his creation was used to such devastating effect.
Directed by Christopher Nolan, the film is a cinematic version of Robert Oppenheimer's life as told in the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. We talk to Murphy about how he inhabited his latest role, and we also hear from Kai Bird about how Oppenheimer's career ended during the era of communist witch-hunts in the USA.
Oppenheimer is Murphy's sixth film with Nolan and easily his biggest cinema role to date. It's also that rarity these days of a film that is released in the cinema long before it goes on television. A big-budget retelling of one man's life, combining elements of horror and thriller, it's a Shakespearean story of triumph and tragedy.
Read our full interview with Murphy in this week's Radio Times magazine – out now.
Also in this week's Radio Times:
- Presenter and daredevil Guy Martin on being kidnapped in Colombia, why he's still a risk taker and why it's OK to be a traditional man
- Former BBC Creative Director Alan Yentob discusses the enduring legacy of his documentary with David Bowie, Cracked Actor. Plus, this issue features previously unseen photographs taken at the time for the original piece that ran in RT 48 years ago
- New series of The Radio Times Podcast: Katie Piper chats about why Channel 4 has been 'ahead of the curve' in representing disfigurement and disability on screen, how she has dealt with adversity, and humanising US female prisoners in her latest series
Read more:
- How did Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer film atomic bomb sequences?
- Meet the cast of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer opens in UK cinemas on Friday 21st July.
Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight.
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