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Cillian Murphy was all set for a music career, until his band was offered a recording contract. Worried that his brother, and fellow band member, was too young for such pressure, Murphy switch direction to become an actor, rocketing to acclaim in Enda Walsh's 1996 breakout play, Disco Pigs. Over the course of his career, Murphy has played a plethora of tormented, villainous men — the Scarecrow in The Dark Night trilogy, Jackson Rippner in Red Eye, and as a gangster in the long-running historical drama Peaky Blinders — and as he told W magazine, “I’m less interested in the good man’s life, I’m more interested in the conflicted man’s life or the contradictory man’s life.”  A perfect fit, in other words, for his most celebrated role to date, as Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan's nuclear blockbuster that has (in tandem with Barbie) seemingly revived the cinema-going experience.