Cillian Murphy tipped to take Golden Globe

Cork’s own Cillian Murphy is the favourite to beat Leonardo DiCaprio and Bradley Cooper to a Golden Globe after nominees for the new year awards ceremony were revealed.

Christopher Nolan’s biographical thriller 'Oppenheimer' is being widely tipped to grab headlines on awards night and its Cork-born star is tipped to walk away with one of the most coveted accolades.

Murphy plays physicist J Robert Oppenheimer in the film. Oppenheimer was the man who headed a team of scientists to design the world’s first atomic bomb during the Second World War. His co-stars Emily Blunt and Robert Downey Jr and director Christopher Nolan are also among the nominees.

Murphy has had a long-running working relationship with Nolan, with their relationship beginning in 2005, when he played Scarecrow in 'The Dark Knight' trilogy. He also appeared in 'Inception' and 'Dunkirk'.

Speaking about playing the role of Oppenheimer, he told The Guardian: "He was dancing between the raindrops morally. He was complex, contradictory, polymathic; incredibly attractive intellectually and charismatic, but ultimately unknowable."

He described the experience of filming the movie as intense, saying: “It’s like you’re on this train that’s just bombing. It’s bang, bang, bang, bang. You sleep for a few hours, get up, bang it again. I was running on crazy energy; I went over a threshold to where I was not worrying about food or anything. I was so in it, a state of hyper something. But it was good because the character was like that. He never ate.”

The Cork native is one three Irishmen on a shortlist of six in the Best Actor in a Motion Picture category, with Dubliners Barry Keoghan and Andrew Scott also in the running for their roles in 'Saltburn' and 'All of Us Strangers'.

The Golden Globes, scheduled for 7 January 2024, mark the beginning of awards season. Undoubtedly, all eyes in the city and county will be tuned in to see whether the Peaky Blinders actor clinches the award.

And while the Cork star is hitting the headlines for his role in 'Oppenheimer', he has also become a topic of discussion for another reason this week. The actor’s name ‘Cillian’ made the list of the most mispronounced words of the year in the U.S. and Britain. Released by the online language learning company Babbel, which commissions The Closed Captioning Group in the U.S. and the British Institute of Verbatim Reports in the U.K., it identifies the top words that news anchors, politicians and other public figures have struggled with.