Before Christian Bale landed the role of Batman/Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy, the filmmaker screen-tested his “Oppenheimer” star Cillian Murphy. Both men have since admitted that Murphy was never a real threat to steal the part from Bale, and Murphy told GQ Magazine UK in a recent interview that it “was for the best” that Bale won the coveted role over him anyway.
“Yes, I think it was for the best because we got Christian Bale’s performance, which is a stunning interpretation of that role,” Murphy said. “I never considered myself as the right physical specimen for Batman. To me, it was always going to be Christian Bale.”
Nolan didn’t think Murphy was right for the part either, but he still screen-tested him for Batman so that executives at Warner Bros. could see what an amazing actor he was. The director wanted Murphy to play the film’s villain, Scarecrow, but Murphy wasn’t exactly a huge movie star. The previous formula for Batman movies was that a big star played the hero’s villain, but Nolan wanted to shake things up.
“Everybody was so excited by watching [Cillian] perform that when I then said to them, ‘Okay, Christian Bale is Batman, but what about Cillian to play Scarecrow?’ There was no dissent,” Nolan recently told Entertainment Weekly. “All the previous Batman villains had been played by huge movie stars: Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Carrey, that kind of thing. That was a big leap for them and it really was purely on the basis of that test. So that’s how you got to play Scarecrow.”
“Batman Begins” would be the first of six collaborations between Nolan and Murphy. He reprised Scarecrow in two more Batman movies and then had supporting roles in “Inception” and “Dunkirk” before landing his first Nolan lead role in “Oppenheimer.” It turns out Murphy was eyed to play the theoretical physicist almost a decade before Nolan’s biographical drama.
In a recent Vanity Fair story, television creator Sam Shaw looked back at the making of his WGN America series “Manhattan.” The period drama covered the same ground as Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” in telling the story of the Manhattan Project’s efforts to build the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M. The acclaimed series ran for two seasons in 2014 and 2016. Oppenheimer was a recurring character on the show played by Daniel London, but series writer Lila Byock said Murphy was on the team’s wish list.
“When we were casting Oppenheimer, we went through a whole series of different ideas,” Byock said, before adding, “A thousand percent, Cillian Murphy was on that list.”
“We wanted Oppenheimer to feel both like he possessed a certain undeniable charisma, a presence onstage, but also that he was playing a different instrument,” Shaw said. “He needed to feel alien — or other — in some ways. He stood out.”
Nearly 10 years later, Murphy is finally Oppenehimer and earning the best reviews of his career. Nolan’s film is now playing in theaters nationwide from Universal Pictures.
