Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was released last year, and it became the third-highest-grossing movie of 2023. In addition to the film’s box office success, it’s also become a critical darling, earning a 93% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. The film scored 13 Academy Award nominations, including ones for Best Picture and Best Director. Cillian Murphy is also nominated for Best Actor, and it’s believed the award will either go to him or Paul Giamatti for The Holdovers. Murphy has already won multiple awards this season, including a SAG Award last night. Recently, Murphy appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live alongside his co-stars and fellow Oscar nominees, Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt. During the chat, Blunt revealed she gifted Murphy a special pillow during the production of Oppenheimer, which led to a head injury.
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“I just felt Cillian needed, even more than food, was sleep on this movie. So I got him this very beautiful pillow that I’m obsessed with. These pillows, Hástens pillows. I gave him this pillow, but… do you mind if I tell the story?” Blunt began. “He was really luxuriating in this pillow one night, and he woke up in the middle of the night, this is what he told me the next day.”
“He went to fluff himself back down in the pillow, misjudged where it was, and smashed his head open on the bedside table,” she continued. “So he came to work, and they had to glue his head shut!”
“I was a bit shocked you know! I was having a great sleep, and I had this amazing pillow, strange bed, strange table, and bang,” Murphy added. “We were getting up at before it was bright, like at 2 AM or something, 3 AM. So I called [makeup designer Luisa Abel] then, and I just came in, and then she glued my head, and covered it all up, and you don’t even see it in the movie, I think.”
Christopher Nolan Says Oppenheimer‘s Success Signifies a “Post-Franchise” Movie Landscape:
During a recent appearance on the Countdown to the BAFTAs podcast, Nolan talked about how the success of Oppenheimer could point to a “post-franchise” shift in Hollywood.
“Everybody has a tendency to talk down the movie business,” Nolan explained. “Really for the whole time I think I’ve been working in movies, I felt the sort of cultural establishment always predicting the demise of movie theaters. Now I get asked that question, you know, ‘What do I think about the health of the movie business?’ I don’t really know how to respond. We just released a three-hour, R-rated film about quantum physics and it made a billion dollars. Like what? Obviously, our view is that the audience is there and they’re excited to see something new.”
“The success of Oppenheimer certainly points to a sort of, post-IP landscape for movies … It’s kind of encouraging,” he continued. “It reminds the studios that there is an appetite for something people haven’t seen before or an approach to things that people haven’t seen before.”
“Something like Oppenheimer working gives other filmmakers a point of reference for how something can work in the marketplace that the studio can relate to,” he added.
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