"Who wants to write about happy people?"- When Cillian Murphy made his feelings clear about the kind of characters he liked to play

By now, Cillian Murphy has become one of the most celebrated and most renowned actors in the world, thanks to his incredible performance as Thomas Shelby in the very popular Peaky Blinders and his Oscar-winning portrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.

But from long before his defining role as the American Prometheus, Cillian Murphy always wanted to play characters that had conflict in them. His acting in Oppenheimer really showed how well he could embody internal conflicts, and even external ones.

The 48-year-old actor has always been interested in roles like this. He also showed the same zeal while taking up the role of Thomas Shelby in Peaky Blinders, who also continuously showed moral and psychological dilemmas. Murphy discussed this preference in a 2016 interview with Harper's Bazaar, long before he was slated to work as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Nolan's blockbuster biopic.

When asked if he was drawn to dark characters like Tommy Shelby, Cillian Murphy said:

"For me, drama is conflict. I'm not interested in a good man's life. I'm interested in contradiction. I'm interested in pressure, I'm interested in duress. All the great works of art, or film or literature, in my opinion, have elements of those in them. Because who wants to write about happy people?"

He further elaborated in this interview how actors' careers are usually very random, and he did not always plan on picking certain genres, but did them because the chance came his way. However, it seems that when it comes to characters, Murphy has his reservations, and nine years from this interview, the actor has continued sticking to the kind of roles he likes.

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"It's purely haphazard"- Cillian Murphy on selecting the scripts he works on

While Cillian Murphy has defined the kind of character he likes to portray and study, there is still a wide variety of movies he has participated in. While it may appear that the actor is trying to do a certain kind of movie, mainly period pieces that have intense drama, he said in the interview that the kind of scripts that come to him are rather random.

When asked about whether he was interested in a particular time period, Murphy said:

"No. Actors' careers are random with a capital "R." A few years ago I did a couple of science fiction films and everyone went, "So you seem to be interested in science fiction, tell me why." They're the scripts that arrive and they're the best scripts around at the time. Free Fire is set in the '70s, Anthropoid and Dunkirk are the war, but it's not conscious. It's purely haphazard."

But through this random array of movies, Cillian Murphy has managed to pick the projects that suit him, and this has led to immense critical acclaim across the world.

Murphy's acting credits include 28 Days Later (2002), Intermission (2003), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), Sunshine (2007), Dunkirk (2017), and his Academy-winning piece, Oppenheimer (2023).

The actor continues to remain active in the industry and is soon set to appear in 28 Years Later, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Steve, and The Immortal Man, all of which are slated to arrive in the coming years.