Inside Cillian Murphy’s First Post-‘Oppenheimer’ Role in ‘Small Things Like These’

Before he arrived on the set of Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy had a clear idea of the first movie he wanted to produce. His old friend, the Peaky Blinders director Tim Mielants, had visited him at his home in Dublin in 2021, and they were on the hunt for material to develop together. Murphy’s wife, the visual artist Yvonne McGuinness, suggested an adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These—an acclaimed novel published in November of that year that subtly, intimately tackled a painful chapter in Irish history. Murphy checked and saw that the rights were available—“kind of a miracle,” he says now—and got to work on putting the project together.

He just had one thing standing in his way: the most significant screen role of his career, one that would go on to win him the best-actor Oscar. Yet Oppenheimer turned out to be not an impediment, but the exact right place for Small Things Like These to come together. (Watch the trailer exclusively below.)

“I gave the script to Matt [Damon] when we were shooting, and he loved it,” the Irish native tells me. Murphy made a specific sell to his Oppenheimer costar that won Damon over: “I remember saying that it’s a different film, but it would share some thematic crossover with Manchester by the Sea, which Matt also produced…. It was like I was pitching between Manchester by the Sea and Doubt.” From there, Murphy gave Damon the script, and swiftly, Damon signed on to produce the project via Artists Equity, the company he cofounded with Ben Affleck. “They paid for the movie,” Murphy says bluntly. “It was remarkably quick, the way it came together.”

For a first post-Oppenheimer project, Small Things Like These feels like a thrilling change of pace for Murphy. Set in the small Irish town of New Ross, circa 1985, the film follows Bill Furlong, a good-hearted coal merchant who’s confronted with the secret abuses happening inside his local convent. These incidents are drawn from the real-life Magdalene Laundries, in which Catholic nuns around Ireland separated unmarried, pregnant, isolated women from their children, until the last one closed in 1996. Bill wrestles with both taking on his community’s most powerful institution and his own past, thinking about the death of his mother and the life of his daughters in the context of this horrific new discovery.

“It’s so seemingly simple, but it’s incredibly complex, actually, when you look at it,” Murphy says. “It’s massively intertwined with Irish people, our history and our culture and trauma and all of that stuff. I feel that sometimes art is a gentler way of addressing or confronting that than, perhaps, government reports or academic papers.”

Bill’s silent, burgeoning empathy provides a painful, honest window into the processing of a shameful historical chapter. “Ireland at the time, men were not allowed to express their feelings or cope with their feelings…and having a character who’s extremely vulnerable and can’t express his feelings at the same time, hidden behind a concrete wall, was for me like a beautiful volcano of emotions that I could play with,” the director, Mielants, tells me. “It’s ridiculous what Cillian does in front of the lens. You can adjust it in very tiny ways, but as far as I’m concerned, he’s the best actor on the planet.”

The partnership between actor and filmmaker was particularly meaningful for Mielants given the personal roots of the project. “Bill’s kind of delayed grief—I experienced a similar kind of traumatic event in my life, and I always come back to it,” he says. In the lead-up to filming, he and Murphy would share stories and talk extensively about the resonance of the material. “I’m sharing my pain with him all the time at every single moment in the story, in every shot,” Mielants says. “I never saw an actor express so well and so much, in that depth, what I’ve been through. It was remarkable.”

“I was pretty broken after Oppenheimer,” Cillian Murphy tells me. “Just physically and mentally, I was a bit worn out. We shot that film so fast, and the prep for it had been very intense. Losing all that weight was hard to do—and it was hard to get back to normal.” It’s no wonder, then, that the actor took a long break, of well over six months total, once filming finished on the Christopher Nolan epic. Small Things Like These was his first time back on a movie set, months after wrapping Oppenheimer, and he needed that recharging period before delving into another intense character.

Shooting in Ireland helped him get back into the swing of things: “I was very happy to make a film at home.” But Murphy found the weight of Bill’s trauma difficult to carry at times, particularly after filming an especially emotionally draining scene in a barber shop. “It does exact a bit of a cost,” Murphy says. “Your psyche is trying to understand why you’re feeling what you’re making yourself feel.” He adds that this is a hallmark of Mielants’s approach as a director: “He’s pushing for this real, raw emotion.”

Though his only previous producing credit was as an executive producer on Peaky Blinders, Murphy tacked on extensive duties behind the scenes as well. He brought in screenwriter Enda Walsh, knowing his style would match well with Mielants’s. He asked Eileen Walsh, a collaborator he hadn’t worked with in years, to reunite with him to play his wife. He brought in crew members he’d known over many years. “That’s where I really enjoy the work,” Murphy says. He’s eager to produce more going forward, knowing he’s set a high bar for himself.

Lionsgate will release Small Things Like These in theaters on November 8, a week after the movie bows in the UK and Ireland. We’re only six months out from Murphy’s lengthy, ultimately triumphant Oscar run for Oppenheimer, which he admits he still hasn’t fully processed: “It was a bit of a fever dream, and very overwhelming.” He was still in the midst of that campaign whirlwind when Small Things Like These premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival this year to rave reviews, ultimately winning a prize for supporting actor Emily Watson. Murphy may be in the Oscar conversation again now, since Small Things Like These ultimately rests on his powerful work in front of the camera.

The intricate performance provides a quiet anchor for a quiet film. You sense Murphy’s excitement at making a movie that’s so drastically different in scope from his previous project. “You don’t need to say anything—you can feel it or think it, and the audience gets it and the camera reads it,” he says. “That’s the sort of filmmaking or acting that I love the most—that asks questions of the audience.”

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