Cillian Murphy is an Irish actor who has had an extensive career in film, television and stage. Murphy made his professional debut in playwright Enda Walsh's 1996 play Disco Pigs, a role he later reprised in the 2001 screen adaptation. He later made his feature film debut as a bartender in the Irish drama Sweety Barrett (1998). While he found film and theatre work throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, his breakthrough came with his lead role as pandemic survivor Jim in Danny Boyle's horror film 28 Days Later. Other films that followed included Intermission (2003), Red Eye (2005), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), and Sunshine (2007). He portrayed a transgender Irish woman in the comedy-drama Breakfast on Pluto (2005), which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. In 2011, Murphy reunited with Walsh in his play Misterman which debuted at the Galway International Arts Festival. Murphy and Walsh continued to collaborate in the latter's own Ballyturk and an adaptation of Max Porter's novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. He continued to act in mainstream studio films such as Tron: Legacy (2010), In Time (2011), In the Heart of the Sea (2015), and A Quiet Place Part II (2020), as well as in independent films such as Retreat (2011), Free Fire (2016), The Delinquent Season (2018), and Small Things like These (2024).

Murphy began his collaboration with filmmaker Christopher Nolan in 2005, playing the Scarecrow in The Dark Knight trilogy (2005–2012) as well as appearing in Inception (2010) and Dunkirk (2017). He portrayed J. Robert Oppenheimer in Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023), for which he won several accolades including BAFTA and Academy Award for Best Actor. In addition to his roles in film and theatre, he is known for his role as Tommy Shelby in the BBC period drama series Peaky Blinders (2013–2022), a role he reprised in the feature film Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (2026), which he also co-produced.