Cillian Murphy, the 47-year-old Academy Award-nominated actor for his role in Oppenheimer, is featured on the cover of GQ’s March issue. In the interview, he shares his preference for engaging in conversations with fans rather than capturing photographic evidence of their encounters.
“I don’t do photos,” he told a fan who approached him during his interview with the magazine, going on to tell GQ of refusing photo ops, “Once I started doing that, it changed my life.”
However, it’s not because he lacks appreciation for his fans. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Murphy’s intention is to truly savor the moment.
“I just think it’s better to say hello and have a little conversation,” he said. “I tell that to a lot of people, you know, actor friends of mine, and they’re just like, ‘I feel so bad.’ But you don’t need a photo record of everywhere you’ve been in a day.”
Although Murphy does have “a couple of” actor friends, as he mentioned to the outlet, he emphasized that-
“The majority of my buddies are not in the business.”
“I also love not working,” he continued. “And I think for me a lot of research as an actor is just f—ing living, and, you know, having a normal life doing regular things and just being able to observe, and be, in that sort of lovely flow of humanity.”
Cillian Murphy has been vocal about his choice not to live in Hollywood. Instead, he resided in London during his 20s and 30s. In 2015, the Irish native relocated to Dublin with his wife, Yvonne McGuinness, whom he has been married to for nearly 20 years, along with their two sons, Malachy (18) and Aran (16). They now reside near the sea.
Regarding living life beyond his career, Murphy expressed,
“If you can’t do that because you’re going from film festival to movie set to promotions … I mean, that’s ‘The Bubble.'”
“I’m not saying that makes you any better or less as an actor, but it’s just a world that I couldn’t exist in. I find it would be very limiting on what you can experience as a human being, you know?” Murphy added.
Reflecting on his fame over the years, the Golden Globe winner, also recognized for his roles in 28 Days Later (2003), Batman Begins (2005), Red Eye (2005), Inception (2010), and more, shared,
“To me, it always seems to go in waves.”
“When Peaky was at its kind of apex, you’d feel a different energy around, walking around, a little bit like I do now — but then it settles down again,” Murphy said. “Then you don’t have something in the cinema for ages, and people forget about it. It seems to be like that, and you sort of ride that, and then things go back to normal.”