Irish actor Cillian Murphy won a well-deserved Oscar for his role as J. Robert Oppenheimer in director Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. This was Murphy’s first nomination for an Academy Award. Before Oppenheimer, the actor was best known as the rogue Thomas Shelby in BBC’s Peaky Blinders (2013). Nolan and Murphy had worked together starting in 2005 with Batman Begins, and Murphy then starred in Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) — a film that won eight Oscar nods and three wins. Oppenheimer was in some way a gift to Murphy from Nolan, a biopic that would allow a captivating actor to exercise his craft with an exceptional script. As the Wall Street Journal’s film critic Kyle Smith characterized, this is a “well deserved Oscar for Cillian Murphy. He just rules the screen in Oppenheimer.”

“We made a film about the man who created the atomic bomb, and for better or worse, we’re all living in Oppenheimer’s world. So I’d really like to dedicate this to the peacemakers everywhere,” Murphy said in his acceptance.

Anthony Breznican writes for Vanity Fair:

With his sharp cheekbones and simmering blue eyes, he physically resembles J. Robert Oppenheimer, the historic physicist Nolan chose to depict in his film about the creation and deployment of the atomic bomb. He had been one of the stars considered for the same role in Manhattan, an earlier TV dramatization of the secretive Manhattan Project that birthed the weapons at the end of World War II. In Nolan’s case, Murphy said he didn’t even need to read the completed script before saying yes. “Every time Chris has called me, I’ve always said yes before I’ve read the script. So it’s just a formality,” Murphy said in a Vanity Fair interview.

Formality is Nolan’s way, however. Here’s how Oppenheimer first came to Murphy: “He generally tends to just call me out of the blue. Or Emma Thomas, his wife and producer, calls me because Chris doesn’t possess a phone or a computer or an email,” the actor says. “So she called me and I was totally unaware that this was happening.”

Nolan then got on the line to explain: “He said, ‘Look, I have a script. It’s called Oppenheimer. I’d like you to play Oppenheimer.’ Then what he always does, though, is he flies to wherever you are and gives you the actual script himself—in person. And it’s always printed on red paper with black ink. And it was a tome. It was a doorstopper of a thing.”

Robert Downey Jr. received an Oscar for his supporting role in Oppenheimer as the antagonist Lewis Strauss.