Last year, you could see the unease fall across Cillian Murphy’s face as soon as the Oppenheimer promotion began. He quickly developed a thousand-yard stare, a sort of forced blankness as he tried to promote his starring role in the biggest movie of his career. He eventually swept the awards season, winning the Golden Globe, BAFTA, SAG and Academy Awards. By Oscar night, his social battery was completely drained and it showed, but he still managed to get through it. In between filming Oppenheimer and promoting Oppenheimer, Cillian produced and worked on Small Things Like These, set in Ireland and filmed there too. It’s based on a bestseller by the same name, and the story is based on the real-life Magdalene Laundries, which continued well into the 1990s. To promote the film (which comes out in November), Cillian recently spoke to Vanity Fair, and he confirmed that the awards season was super-painful.
How Matt Damon came on a producer: “I gave the script to Matt [Damon] when we were shooting, and he loved it,” the Irish native tells me. Murphy made a specific sell to his Oppenheimer costar that won Damon over: “I remember saying that it’s a different film, but it would share some thematic crossover with Manchester by the Sea, which Matt also produced…. It was like I was pitching between Manchester by the Sea and Doubt.” From there, Murphy gave Damon the script, and swiftly, Damon signed on to produce the project via Artists Equity, the company he cofounded with Ben Affleck. “They paid for the movie,” Murphy says bluntly. “It was remarkably quick, the way it came together.”
The tragic history of Magdalene Laundries: “It’s so seemingly simple, but it’s incredibly complex, actually, when you look at it. It’s massively intertwined with Irish people, our history and our culture and trauma and all of that stuff. I feel that sometimes art is a gentler way of addressing or confronting that than, perhaps, government reports or academic papers.”
How he felt after Oppenheimer: “I was pretty broken after Oppenheimer. Just physically and mentally, I was a bit worn out. We shot that film so fast, and the prep for it had been very intense. Losing all that weight was hard to do—and it was hard to get back to normal.” It’s no wonder, then, that the actor took a long break, of well over six months total, once filming finished on the Christopher Nolan epic. Small Things Like These was his first time back on a movie set, months after wrapping Oppenheimer, and he needed that recharging period before delving into another intense character.
Shooting the film in Ireland: “I was very happy to make a film at home.” But Murphy found the weight of Bill’s trauma difficult to carry at times, particularly after filming an especially emotionally draining scene in a barber shop. “It does exact a bit of a cost,” Murphy says. “Your psyche is trying to understand why you’re feeling what you’re making yourself feel.”
He hasn’t fully processed his awards season: “It was a bit of a fever dream, and very overwhelming.”
It sounds like working on Oppenheimer was harder than promoting it, although Cillian lucked out (inadvertently) with the actors’ strike and writers’ strike. I’m glad he had time to decompress after he shot Oppenheimer, and I would assume he did the same after the awards season too. It’s so funny to watch a full-grown introverted adult man deal with all of the craziness that comes with a huge box office success and winning a lot of awards. Props to Cillian though – he did it without whining or throwing tantrums. As for Small Things Like These, I’m really interested in seeing it, although I know it’s going to make me mad. All of that Catholicism and Church abuses, all of it in plain sight. More art pieces need to be made about this awful chapter of Irish history.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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- Oscar® nominee Cillian Murphy and guest arrive on the red carpet of the 96th Oscars® at the Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 10, 2024.,Image: 855702501, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: SI / Avalon
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- Oscar® nominee Cillian Murphy arrives on the red carpet of the 96th Oscars® at the Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 10, 2024.,Image: 855704417, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: SRS / Avalon
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- Cillian Murphy poses backstage with the Oscar® for Actor in a Leading Role during the live ABC telecast of the 96th Oscars® at Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 10, 2024.,Image: 855772272, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: Avalon.red / Avalon
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- Cillian Murphy at the 96th Annual Academy Awards held at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, USA on March 10, 2024,Image: 905501723, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: Lumeimages.com / ImageBROKER / Avalon
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- 30th Screen Actors Guild Awards at the Shrine Auditorium on February 25, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA,Image: 910211969, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Pictured: Cillian Murphy, Credit line: Nicky Nelson / Wenn / Avalon
A wretched chapter indeed. I just purchased video to stream. Plan to watch it tonight.
I cannot wait to see small things like these. The book was fantastic, and yes, it will make you mad but if the movie goes like the book goes, it will also make you feel good. Hard to explain, but I think it will be so good and I am certain he will be so good in it
I’d be interested in watching STLT, but it would have to wait till next year.
The Guardian did quite a bit of reporting on not only the Magdalene Laundries, but also about other homes for unmarried mothers — where the women were abused, and many babies died and were hastily buried in shallow graves, together with dozens of others.
Good on Cilian to get Matt Damon on board to realize this project.
That said:
“All of that Catholicism and Church abuses, all of it in plain sight.”
It seems abuse is a constructional fault of all Christian churches. The Catholics in Ireland, or in Italy, or Latin America, US, or in African countries. It’s either child abuse (sexual or mental), or corporeal punishment, abuse of women, abuse of power, of finances.
As we have seen with the former Archbishop Welby, it’s the same in the Anglican church, where he knew but didn’t act. Or the Lutheran church in German-speaking European countries. Or the awful Evangelicals in the US.
@nanea you raise a great point about it being a constructional fault. I have always thought of this as being a logical consequence of human nature, that if you tell a fallible human being that they’re ordained by God with some special powers that’s just naturally going to bring out the worst in us.
I think there’s some limited research on sociopaths as well and evidence that the priesthood is a profession favored by sociopaths (along with other positions of power). I feel this point in history with #45/47 getting power again, is a great reminder of how much of human history is shaped by the ~1/20 people who lack empathy at a clinical level and somehow maneuver themselves into power. And we failed as a society, because we gave them access to that power through weak governance systems and because we never learn.
I heard the theory once that in large, devout Catholic families, invariably one child starts showing signs of being LGBT, and that kid gets pushed into the church, so what you have is clergy who never had the chance to understand their own sexuality before taking vows of celibacy, are confused with a healthy dose of church-inspired self-loathing, and given unrestricted access to children.
That’s not at all the same thing as being a sociopath, but it is creating the conditions for abuse.
I’m not sure it’s a fault within religion itself. Awful as it may be, abuse numbers of abuse that took place within religious structures are still lower than abuse outside religion. It always worries me as a teacher that I will not pick up on it. I’ve been teaching for 14 years, I must have missed dozens of cases of child abuse.
Are there systemic and widespread cover ups of abuse as large outside of religious structures?
Recovering Catholic here. The Catholic church is responsible for so much trauma for so many years in so many places. It is especially brutal towards women. I left in my mid twenties and never looked back. Never understood why anyone stays since there are much better ways to experience spirituality.
I started walking away in my early 20s and the Netflix series The Keepers was it for me, the final nail in my Catholic coffin. I said NOPE not raising my kids anywhere close to that.
I was never super religious or spiritual but I did find the rituals of Mass comforting and sort of figured my kids would receive their first communion etc. But NOPE.
The Keepers! That is an excellent series and, last time I checked, it was still available on Netflix. Highly recommend.
It was weird for me because it was very very local and I knew a lot of the people in it and then it was produced by someone I went to college with (not local.) But the part that made me just scream was when the man at the end who was assaulted by the priest was talking about it – I knew him – and I just yelled AND YET ALL OF YOUR CHILDREN WERE ALTAR SERVERS.
And that was kind of the end for me. Like you experienced this trauma and you set your children up to experience the exact same trauma. (they didn’t AFAIK but the pastor at our very large church/school was moved there after being credibly accused of assaulting children…….which was also another nail in the coffin for me.)
Wow, Becks! Knowing all that must have made the whole series even more profound and painful to watch. I don’t know if I could’ve completed the series with those kinds of personal connections.
Just to complement that the church is also a reflection of the society. Families brought their daughters to these homes and turned their backs on them. The reckoning and the blame lies with the whole country (my country btw). It’s easy to blame the church, and the whole institution was up to its eyeballs in this awful awful thing. But it’s not like people didn’t know. They willfully turned away from the suffering in the name of propriety and moral relativism. Nothing like looking down on a sinner to make people feel smug. It’s a bit too easy for us to put all the blame on the church
There was a Magdellen Sisters film by Peter Mullen made in 2002. It was good, He made it in response to the articles detailing the huge amount of people who were coming forward to tell their stories at the turn of the century.
I remember that movie! It was really well done.
There is a documentary as well, Sex in a Cold Climate. It’s wrenching.
There’s also Philomena with Judy Dench. Great film.
Dara Obriain’s, an Irish comedian, last special had a section about being adopted. He had had no interest in finding his birth parents, but then saw Philomena and realized that his own mother had probably been forced to give him up, so he talks about searching for her. It’s funny and very sweet, but yeah, it’s an interesting view about how so many people were and are still being affected by them.
Great movie! Very quiet, It is a study of trauma and carryon while putting off depression that is deep in your psyche. Love it! I love Cillian’s acting always even when the movie is not good.
But it’s not a chapter in our history, it is still very much ongoing. The Irish government have a mother and baby redress scheme in place that excludes most of the homes and thus the majority of victims from compensation for what they endured in these hellholes. Our politicians voted “No” to children housed in these pits being entitled to redress if they were there less than six months, they capped the payments to 65,000 for those in the institutions for over 10 years, yes 10 YEARS held in captivity for being a pregnant woman. These abuses are still ongoing and the government have done the bare minimum to redress the suffering of the women and children involved, they are deliberately delaying payments so older claimants will die before they receive redress. the government is also asking that people prove entry and exit dates for these institutions, but people obviously cannot access that information as the government have sealed the records for “privacy”.
3,600 people have applied for redress with 370 people approved to receive payment, but only 53 have actually received payment as of
Recovering Catholic here. Sinéad O’Connor was a victim of of the Magdalene Laundries. I’m grateful for artists like Cillian Murphy and glad he keeps Hollywood at a bit of a distance.
Perhaps not exactly relevant to the topic, but Irish author Niall Williams has a new book out called TIME OF THE CHILD, and part of it makes references to this horrible part of Irish history. Some of it is about the guilt a doctor has when he dealt with an unwed mother and how decades later he goes to huge lengths to try to avoid that situation again. It is a GORGEOUS book. Niall Williams is such a brilliant author and, IMO, this may be his best one yet. You can tell from the book that this scar still impacts Irish people today.
The novel by Claire Keegan is a quick, but amazing if painful, read. I’m eager to see the movie.
It’s an important reminder that it wasn’t just the Catholic priests who were abusive — it was some of the nuns, too.
The nuns who taught me were mostly lovely, but there were a few who were sadists, forced into the convent by circumstances (conservative families, no marital prospects, etc.).
I left the church because of the priest child sexual abuse horrors. Like Becks1, I loved the Catholic Mass — I found it comforting that it was the same no matter which country I was in. But I couldn’t stay in the church after the truth of the sexual abuse, and the Magdalen laundries, was revealed. My siblings all left, too.
The actress Geraldine McEwan [aka one of the Mrs Marples] turned in a truly simmering evil portrayal of Sister Bernadette in the 2001/2002 film The Magdalene Sisters. I have some recall of the scene where Sister Bernadette lectures the 3 newly interned/incarcerated women about “the wages of sin” as she is counting the daily take from the laundry service & securing the bills into tidy rolls secured w/ rubber bands.
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I checked out the book STLT after a CB recommend when the film trailer was posted to this site. The author listed some historical research in the Afterward. A number of stolen babies were part of an adoption scheme catering to wealthy American families. A $ide hu$tle, if you will. The author added:
“These institutions were run & financed by the Catholic Church in concert w the Irish State. No apology was issued by the Irish govt over the Magdalen laundries until Taoiseach Enda Kenny did in 2013.”
Woman in the Wall on Paramount+ with Showtime was really good. It stars Ruth Wilson.