Cillian Murphy Would Rather You Didn't Talk About His Weight Loss for 'Oppenheimer'

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | July 19, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | July 19, 2023 |

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer opens this week, offering audiences a non-hot pink viewing alternative. The Summer of Barbenheimer has offered much entertainment, and both films have received a plethora of positive reviews. It’s a good time for Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy, who is receiving some of the strongest write-ups of his illustrious career. Murphy is notoriously private, preferring to stay out of the private eye, and the chances are we won’t see a lot of him (or the rest of the massive cast) this season thanks to the SAG-AFTRA strike. So, expect to see a lot of the same headlines regurgitated over and over again in an attempt to pad out the next few weeks for precious content.

This leads us to the current Oppenheimer story of the moment, which has focused heavily on the weight loss Murphy went through to play the lithe J. Robert Oppenheimer, a man who subsided on cigarettes and martinis. In an interview with ExtraTV, co-star Emily Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer’s wife, made a passing comment about how ‘emaciated’ Murphy got for the role. Discussing how Murphy kept to himself on set to stay focused on the role and the weight of this character, Blunt added that Murphy ‘could only eat, like, an almond every day.’ It’s not the main topic of the conversation, and her co-star Matt Damon laughs at this moment, suggesting it’s an exaggeration of what Murphy actually went through.

So, guess which headline everyone went with?

Yup, Page Six, ever the arbiter of journalistic integrity, ”Emaciated’ Cillian Murphy ate just ‘an almond every day’ for ‘Oppenheimer.” The Daily Mail, in-between their regular bouts of transphobia and hoping migrants crossing the ocean die, screamed, ”Cillian Murphy only ate ‘an almond a DAY’ to transform into J. Robert Oppenheimer who existed on ‘cigarettes an martinis’, claims co-star Emily Blunt.’ News.com in Australia went with, ‘Oppenheimer star’s insane diet exposed.’

I’m tired, everyone.

Murphy, for his part, has deliberately avoided talking about his diet for Oppenheimer, and when he has discussed it, he’s framed it in very careful terms. As he told the Guardian, ‘I don’t want it to be, ‘Cillian lost x weight for the part’.’ He won’t say how many pounds he lost, or what he ate. He did note that losing the weight made him ‘competitive’, but that he wouldn’t advise it. All in all, this is about as reasonable as Murphy can be in putting up boundaries around an oft-fetishized part of his job.

Acting is a tough thing to describe. It’s hard to quantify what makes a performance good versus one that isn’t. A lot of people latch onto the very visible parts of the craft to compensate for this, and we cannot help but love the most obviously laborious aspects of it. This is notoriously evident in awards season campaigning, where publicists hammer home the number of pounds an actor lost or put on to get into character. It’s voyeuristic to the point of grotesquery, for me. There’s an obsession with the number, and the ways this process is idolized is near-identical to diet culture as a whole.

What you don’t hear about in these instances as often is how much it can fuck with an actor’s body for life. Tom Hanks has expressed concern that his Type Two diabetes diagnosis may have been tied to his work habit of gaining and losing weight in short periods of time for roles. Christian Bale, who is infamous for his body transformations, admitted that he needed to ‘stop it’ because ‘it’s not healthy for your body. I’m in my mid-40s now, it’s going to start catching up with me if I don’t start being a little bit aware of my mortality.’ Matt Damon lost so much weight in such a short period of time for Courage Under Fire that his doctor worried he’d permanently damaged his heart. The weight George Clooney speedily gained for Syriana put such a strain on his body that it left him depressed, an issue exacerbated by a spinal injury he received during production. Super glamorous, right?

It’s not simply that the industry and press leer at this process; it’s that the media loves to use it as an opportunity to sell more diet culture to the masses. Anne Hathaway called out publications who pushed fake diets while claiming they were how she lost weight for Les Miserables. The majority of actors doing this have dietitians and doctors helping them, and that still doesn’t make it any safer. Contractually obliging people to lose tens of pounds in three months is dangerous. It also encourages disordered eating. How could it not when there are so many plaudits lavished on those who do it?

I commend Murphy for being very specific in what he does and doesn’t want to discuss in terms of his work. I don’t blame Blunt for making a passing gag about her colleague and friend. I do blame the press who saw yet another opportunity to talk fatphobic and pro-disordered eating bullshit and grabbed it with both hands.