Cillian Murphy has won his first Oscar for his role in Oppenheimer. The Irish actor takes home the gong for Best Actor at the Academy Awards, on a night dominated by Christopher Nolan's film.
The win isn't a huge surprise as Murphy has been the one to beat this awards season, picking up the BAFTA and Golden Globe in the lead-up to the Oscars. However, it does mark the first win for the acclaimed actor, whose been much lauded for his previous performances in everything from Dunkirk to Peaky Blinders.
In Oppenheimer, he plays J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who helped develop the first nuclear weapons during World War Two. Nicknamed the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project, the film tracks his life from his early scientific work right through to the hearings he faced over his security clearance in the 1950s.
Murphy beat Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers), Bradley Cooper (Maestro), Colman Domingo (Rustin), and Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction) to win the award. In his speech, he thanked his fellow nominees, as well as Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan for his faith in him.
The pair had collaborated many times before in The Dark Knight films, Inception, and Dunkirk, but this is Murphy's first leading role for the director. "When we got into the edit suite and were putting the performance together, and seeing the truth of it, I was absolutely blown away," Nolan previously told us of Murphy's performance in the film.
