Cillian Murphy warns Oppenheimer 'f***s you up a little bit'

Christopher Nolan's atomic bomb thriller Oppenheimer is set to leave a lasting impression on fans.

Lead by the filmmaker's regular collaborator Cillian Murphy, who first worked with Nolan on The Dark Knight trilogy, this one charts theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's pivotal contributions to the Manhattan Project during World War II.

Chatting to The Guardian ahead of the movie's release this month, Murphy was asked if he's pleased with the final cut.

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"I am, yeah," replied the Irishman. "I don't like watching myself – it's like, 'Oh, f***ing hell' – but it's an extraordinary piece of work. Very provocative and powerful.

"It feels sometimes like a biopic, sometimes like a thriller, sometimes like a horror. It's going to knock people out. What [Nolan] does with film, it f***s you up a little bit."

Meanwhile, it turns out that the electric pace of this Nolan production caused Murphy to forget about both food and sleep.

"It's like you're on this f***ing train that's just bombing. It's bang, bang, bang, bang. You sleep for a few hours, get up, bang it again," he explained. "I was running on crazy energy; I went over a threshold to where I was not worrying about food or anything."

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For Oppenheimer, his 12th feature, Nolan has assembled one of the finest ensemble casts we've ever seen.

Robert Downey Jr plays Lewis Strauss, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, alongside Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer; Florence Pugh's Jean Tatlock, Matt Damon's Leslie Groves, Kenneth Branagh's Niels Bohr, Gary Oldman's Harry S. Truman, Casey Affleck's Boris Pash, and Rami Malek's David Hill.

Oppenheimer comes to UK cinemas on July 21.

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