Actor Cillian Murphy admitted he went to unhealthy extremes while dieting for his titular role in the Christopher Nolan film “Oppenheimer.”
Murphy, who played the role of the physicist behind the race to develop the atomic bomb, said at one point he was actually testing himself to see how little he could eat and still function.
“You become competitive with yourself a little bit which is not healthy. I don’t advise it,” Murphy said, although he flat out refused to say which foods his nutritionist told him to cut out or how much weight he lost in total — mainly because he knew that would be the headline. “I don’t want it to be, ‘Cillian lost x weight for the part.'”
Murphy went on to explain that the pace at which Nolan filmed the project actually made it easier for him to skip meals without even realizing it.
“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. I was running on crazy energy; I went over a threshold to where I was not worrying about food or anything,” he said. “I was so in it, a state of hyper … hyper something. But it was good because the character was like that. He never ate.”
In real life, Oppenheimer – who died of cancer in 1967 — smoked constantly, switching between cigarettes and his pipe while occasionally punctuating the two with a martini.
“Cigarettes and pipes. He would alternate between the two. That’s what did for him in the end. I’ve smoked so many fake cigarettes for ‘Peaky [Blinders]’ and this,” Murphy lamented. “My next character will not be a smoker. They can’t be good for you. Even herbal cigarettes have health warnings now.”
Although Murphy admitted to extreme dieting, it may not have been quite as extreme as costar Emily Blunt made it out to be. “He could only eat, like, an almond every day. He was so emaciated,” she said.