Cillian Murphy has revealed that he learned a lecture in Dutch fluently for a scene in Oppenheimer.
- READ MORE: ‘Oppenheimer’ review: Christopher Nolan’s mind-blowing biopic hits like a bomb to the brain
The actor played J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s biographical epic about the creation of the atomic bomb this summer. The film passed $500million (£392m) at the global box office, making it the most successful WW2 film ever.
In a new book called Unleashing Oppenheimer: Inside Christopher Nolan’s Explosive Atomic-Age Thriller, Murphy admitted that he was “dreading” learning the “small scene” in Dutch for the movie.
He explained: “I remember talking to Chris [Nolan, director] in preproduction and saying, ‘Chris, what do you want to do about this Dutch scene?’ And he said, ‘What are you going to do about this Dutch scene?’”
The Peaky Blinders star added that Nolan always “works at the top of his game, so he expects everyone else to do their work, to do their due diligence”. Murphy had previously worked with Nolan on Inception, Dunkirk and the Dark Knight trilogy of films.
Nolan’s regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who is Dutch, helped Murphy with the scene. As he revealed previously, Murphy asked van Hoytema to record himself reading the lecture. “He recorded it and then I slowed it down so I just learned it phonetically over three months.”
He went on to say that now, it is “one of those things that I will never forget because I did it so many times” and that he “can still say it”.
Speaking to NME recently, Murphy said that he likes playing characters that are “unknowable, ambiguous, kind of enigmatic”, adding: “To me that’s human life: the knotty, weird grey areas… A good man’s life is wholly uninteresting.”
In a five-star review of Oppenheimer, NME wrote that the film was “not just the definitive account of the man behind the atom bomb”, but a “monumental achievement in grown-up filmmaking”.