Cillian Murphy

Cillian Murphy (; born 25 May 1976) is an Irish actor. He began his career performing as a rock musician. After turning down a record deal, he began his acting career in theatre, and in short and independent films in the late 1990s. His first notable roles were in films such as 28 Days Later (2002), Cold Mountain (2003), Intermission (2003), Red Eye (2005) and Breakfast on Pluto (2005), for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy and won an Irish Film and Television Award for Best Actor. Murphy played the character of Jonathan Crane / Scarecrow in the Batman films of The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005–2012). In the mid-late 2000s, he starred in films such as The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), Sunshine (2007), The Edge of Love (2008), Inception (2010) and Peacock (2010). In 2011, Murphy won the Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Actor and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance for Misterman. He also became patron of the UNESCO Child and Family Research Centre at the National University of Ireland Galway. He is closely associated with the work of Professor Pat Dolan, Director UCFRC and UNESCO Chair in Children, Youth and Civic Engagement. In the early 2010s, he appeared in the films In Time (2011), Retreat (2011) and Red Lights (2012). Since 2013, Murphy has portrayed Thomas Shelby, the lead of the BBC gangster series Peaky Blinders, for which he has won two Irish Film and Television Awards for Best Actor – Drama, in 2017 and 2018 respectively. More recently, he has appeared in the films Transcendence (2014), In the Heart of the Sea (2015), Anthropoid (2016) and Dunkirk (2017).