For Fans of Cillian Murphy

Tommy Shelby is the character that took Murphy from supporting player to cultural phenomenon. What Steven Knight's writing gave him, and what he used to astonishing effect, is a man who functions as pure will. There is grief under every decision Tommy makes, and Murphy lets it register in the eyes even when the face stays stone. Six series later, the show had grown into something bigger than crime drama: a portrait of PTSD, working-class ambition, and the seduction of power over a full decade of British history.

Jim, the bicycle courier who wakes up alone in a London drained of people, is a different kind of horror protagonist. Murphy plays him without bravado: frightened, improvising, tender toward the people he finds. Danny Boyle shot on digital video, which gave the empty London streets a rawness that no studio production could fake. The film's argument, that the infected are less frightening than what ordinary people become under pressure, is one Murphy makes persuasive by never losing Jim's fundamental decency.

Christopher Nolan's film is three hours of a man building the thing that will destroy his peace. Murphy carries the physics lectures, the committee hearings, the moral reckonings, and the final tribunal scenes without ever letting Oppenheimer become a symbol before he is a person. The performance won him the Oscar, but what earns the repeated viewing is how much Murphy withholds: you are always watching someone think, never quite certain what conclusion he has reached.

Murphy has appeared in every Christopher Nolan film since Batman Begins, sometimes as a lead, sometimes in a single unforgettable scene. The collaboration works because both men are interested in architecture: how do you build a character whose interior life is only glimpsed? Murphy's Scarecrow, his Eames in Inception, his barely-there appearance in Interstellar, and his Oppenheimer form a lineage of men who understand systems, and are undone by them.