Cillian Murphy injured himself during the making of “Oppenheimer,” but not while the cameras were rolling.
The Oscar-nominated actor appeared on Thursday’s broadcast of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” with his co-stars Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt, who revealed that she gifted Murphy a pillow amid the demanding production to help him get proper sleep — only for things to go terribly awry.
She explained that her fellow actor needed sleep “even more than food,” referencing the strict diet that Murphy adopted to portray the film’s titular scientist. Blunt thus gifted him a Hästens pillow — a product that she’s been “obsessed with” and apparently costs hundreds of euros.
“He was really luxuriating in this pillow one night, and he woke up in the middle of the night ... and he went to fluff himself back down in the pillow, misjudged where it was ... and smashed his head open on the bedside table,” she said.
“So he came to work, and they had to glue his head shut!” Blunt exclaimed.
Murphy explained that he and the film’s makeup designer, Luisa Abel, regularly got up around 2 a.m. to prepare for each day’s shoot. He thus simply ignored the injury and headed to set, where Abel “glued” his head and “covered it all up.”
The actor, who noted that “you don’t even see it in the movie,” said that he was nonetheless still shaken by the incident. “I was a bit shocked, you know. I was having a great sleep, and I had this amazing pillow, strange bed, strange table, [and] bang,” Murphy recalled.
Murphy went to rigorous lengths to portray J. Robert Oppenheimer, which his co-stars continue to highlight amid the film’s Oscar campaign. Blunt, who played the scientist’s wife, has said that Murphy often ate only almonds and apples during the making of the film. And Matt Damon purportedly joked that Murphy was “the worst dinner companion” ever due to his fixation on his role.
“Oppenheimer,” which chronicles the secret U.S. research and development project to build an atomic bomb during World War II, received 13 Oscar nods in January. The film’s nominees include Murphy, who’s a front-runner in his category, and director Christopher Nolan
The Academy Awards ceremony is set to air March 10 on ABC.