Inside Cillian Murphy’s First Post-‘Oppenheimer’ Role in ‘Little Things Like This’
Before he came set of Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy had a clear idea of the first film he wanted to produce. His old friend, Peaky Blinders manager Tim Mielants, visited him at his home in Dublin in 2021 and they were looking for material to develop together. Murphy’s wife, a visual artist Yvonne McGuinness, propose an adaptation of Claire Keegan‘S Little things like this—a critically acclaimed novel published that November that dealt with a poignant, sensitive chapter in Irish history. Murphy checked and found that the rights were available—“like a miracle,” he says now—and set about the project.
He has only one thing standing in his way: the most important role of his career on screen, a role that will help him win Oscar for Best Actor. Not yet Oppenheimer turned out not to be an obstacle, but the exact right place for Little things like this to come together. (Watch the exclusive trailer below.)
“I gave the script to Blur [Damon] while we were filming, and he loved it,” the Irish native told me. Murphy sold him specifically Oppenheimer co-star convinced Damon: “I remember saying it was a different movie, but it would share some crossover themes with Manchester by the Sea, which Matt also produced…. It’s like I’m pitching between Manchester by the Sea And Suspect.” From there, Murphy gave Damon the script and Damon quickly signed on to produce the project through Artists Equity, the company he co-founded. Ben Affleck. “They paid for the movie,” Murphy said flatly. “It happened incredibly quickly, the way it happened.”
For the first post-Oppenheimer project, Little things like this feels like a thrilling change of pace for Murphy. Set in the small Irish town of New Ross, circa 1985, the film follows Bill Furlong, a kindly coal merchant who comes face to face with the secret abuses taking place inside his local convent. These incidents are taken from the real-life Magdalene Laundries, where Catholic nuns across Ireland segregated unmarried, pregnant women from their children, living in isolation, until the last one closed in 1996. Bill struggles with both the takeover of his community’s most powerful institution and his own past, reflecting on the death of his mother and the lives of his daughters against the backdrop of this horrifying new revelation.
“It seems so simple, but it’s actually incredibly complex when you look at it,” Murphy said. “It’s so tied to the Irish people, our history, our culture, our trauma and all that stuff. I feel like sometimes art is a gentler way to address or confront that than maybe government reports or academic papers.”
Bill’s quiet, evolving empathy provides a painful, honest window into the processing of a shameful chapter in history. “In Ireland at that time, men were not allowed to express their emotions or deal with their emotions… and having a character who was so vulnerable and unable to express his emotions at the same time, hiding behind a concrete wall, for me was like a beautiful emotional volcano that I could play with,” director Mielants told me. “What Cillian does on camera is ridiculous. You can tweak it in very small ways, but for me, he’s the best actor on the planet.”
The collaboration between actor and filmmaker was especially meaningful to Mielants because of the project’s personal origins. “Bill seemed to be deferring grief—I had gone through a similar traumatic event in my life, and I kept recalling it,” he says. In preparation for filming, he and Murphy would share stories and talk extensively about the resonance of the material. “I was sharing my grief with him at every moment of the story, in every scene,” Mielants says. “I’ve never seen an actor embody what I was going through so well and so deeply. It was remarkable.”
