Cillian Murphy ‘Knew’ He Was Wrong for Batman Role After Audition: I’m Not ‘the Physical Specimen’

Long before Cillian Murphy led Christopher Nolan’s new epic Oppenheimer, the Irish actor auditioned to play Batman in the director’s acclaimed Dark Knight trilogy.

During Murphy’s recent appearance on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, the 47-year-old actor recalled that he ultimately realized he was the “wrong” choice to play Bruce Wayne / Batman after he tried out for the role using the costume Val Kilmer wore for 1995’s Batman Forever.
“So, that was 20 years ago. I think he’d seen 28 Days Later, actually,” Murphy said, when host Marc Maron asked how he first met the filmmaker, 52. “We met up here in L.A. He for some reason wanted me to screen test for Batman, which I think I knew — and he knew — I was wrong for.”

“But I did the test, and then he saw something in that and cast me as Scarecrow [in Batman Begins] and we continued on making movies,” Murphy said during the podcast appearance.
“I don’t think I’m the physical specimen to play Bruce Wayne,” he added, when the host asked why he wasn’t right for the part. “[Christian Bale] transformed himself into that role and he’s done many, many times. I think he defined that role as Batman.”

Batman Forever made for the last live-action Batman movie prior to Nolan’s films; as a result, all actors who auditioned for the part wore Kilmer’s suit from that movie, Murphy said during the podcast.

“It was quite roomy,” he shared of his experience trying on the full suit. “It’s a f—— operation getting into those things.”

Murphy ultimately appeared as the villain Scarecrow in each of Nolan’s three Dark Knight movies. He then went on to play supporting roles in several more Nolan movies, including Inception and Dunkirk, before teaming up with the filmmaker once more for Oppenheimer’s lead role.

“It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right,” he told Maron of his Batman audition during the podcast. “Imagine this, I’m getting to try on a suit, a Batman suit, on the [Warner Bros.] lot, and do a screen test for Christopher Nolan. That’s all my expectations were at the time.”

The Peaky Blinders star portrays physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the new biopic from Nolan, which centers around Oppenheimer’s crucial role within the United States’ efforts to build an atomic bomb during World War II, as well as Oppenheimer’s life before and after the war.

“I have always said publicly and privately, to Chris, that if I’m available and you want me to be in a movie, I’m there. I don’t really care about the size of the part,” Murphy told the Associated Press back in May of finally starring in a Nolan movie.

“But deep down, secretly, I was desperate to play a lead for him,” he added at the time.
Oppenheimer is in theaters Friday.

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