How Cillian Murphy’s Face Became the Internet’s Favorite Meme

For more than half a decade, Cillian Murphy and his disappointed interview face have been a beloved paradox for the perpetually online. The Oppenheimer star’s tired blue eyes and plastered-on expression have long reflected the bone-deep exhaustion many smooth-brained netizens feel every day while enduring the slings and arrows of the real world. And yet, when NME asked the Irish actor in 2017 if he was aware that his visible ennui had become a meme, he could only ask, ever so earnestly, “What’s a meme?” At that point, it was game over—after all, there’s nothing the internet loves more than someone who doesn’t seem to give a shit about the internet.

Since that interview (and also thanks to the rise of Peaky Blinders as a beloved streaming show), it’s been open season on the Murphy memes. But it wasn’t until I saw a TikTok star wearing his face on a maxi skirt that I realized we’d reached full cultural saturation. In 2023, Cillian Murphy and endless Oppenheimer memes officially blew up the internet.

As that 2017 NME conversation indicates, Murphy’s internet notoriety is not new. Still, he seemed borderline inescapable this year—especially as Barbenheimer took over the box office this summer. Suddenly, his face was everywhere. Look over here, and you’ll find AI-edited images of Oppy making a creepy smile. Take a gander over there, and you might stumble on one of those interrogation scene memes, in which some X user compares the Oppenheimer interrogation scene to trying to get homework help from an irritated father. Look a little to the left, and there’s a fancam of Murphy dissociating while a TikToker likens his character’s innovation to restarting the family WiFi. Shift your gaze to the right, and there’s his terrifyingly warped face, as seen from the front row in an IMAX screening. Whatever your preferred style of internet absurdity might be, this year, there was a Murphy for all tastes.

There’s no small irony to Murphy’s ascent as a mascot for internet-bound disillusionment, given his historic distaste for various aspects of the Celebrity Meme Industrial Complex. Then again, that disdain is central to his ascent as a disaffected icon—a distinction that only grows more powerful when one considers how much he’d probably hate being called an “icon” at all.

Speaking with Rolling Stone UK this year about the complications of becoming a cultural icon as Peaky Blinder’s Tommy Shelby, Murphy confessed, “It can ruin experiences, because it fetishises everything: You can be walking down the street and someone takes a picture like this is a fucking event. It kind of destroys nuance and human behavior.” At the same time, he recognized, “that’s part and parcel” of being famous.

Months later, during a conversation with The Guardian, Murphy detailed his profound distaste for talk shows. “I do them because you’re contractually obliged to,” he said. “I just endure them. I’ve always found it difficult.” While he recognizes the privilege of being in a position to promote big releases on talk shows, he said, “I don’t enjoy the personality side of being an actor. I don’t understand why I should be entertaining and scintillating on a talk show. I don’t know why all of a sudden that’s expected of me. Why?”

For anyone who’s ever gotten tired of having to put on a “face” in public or at work, this resentment hits like a freight train.

There’s also a political aspect to Murphy’s internet-authored persona: Social media users have long enjoyed sharing interview clips in which Murphy corrects interviewers who call him British. (While Northern Ireland remains a part of the United Kingdom, Ireland has been an independent country for more than a century.) This year, Murphy’s refusal to humor folks who don’t know the difference led to another viral moment when an old video of him meeting Prince Harry—and, seemingly, giving him side-eye—started making the rounds. A doctored version of the clip also began to surface, in which audio from a past interview made it seem as though Murphy had issued his tried-and-true correction to the prince himself. False as it might have been, the internet seemed to love the idea of Murphy correcting British royalty.

At this point in his life, Cillian Murphy definitely knows what a meme is; in fact, he told Margot Robbie as much during a recent interview. But part of me wishes that he could have spent the rest of his life in the dark—ensconced from the bleak perils of online life like Henry David Thoreau in his beloved Walden. Alas, much like Oppenheimer’s bomb, the internet is a tool once conceived for good that has since become an inescapable force that will eventually affect us all.