The Alternate Reality Where Cillian Murphy Played Oppenheimer on TV—and Never Won His Oscar

Hollywood history is littered with “what if” moments—those casting near-misses and alternate timelines where the careers of actors and directors might have unfolded in drastically different ways. For Cillian Murphy, one such fork in the road nearly came a decade before his Oscar-winning turn in Oppenheimer.

Christopher Nolan’s 2023 atomic-age epic has already cemented its place as the crowning jewel in the director’s career—at least until his next meticulously crafted blockbuster. The buzz began the moment the project was announced, culminating in the cultural phenomenon of “Barbenheimer,” when moviegoers devoured both Nolan’s nuclear biopic and Greta Gerwig’s candy-colored Barbie in a single sitting. Today, it’s impossible to imagine anyone but Murphy as the haunted J. Robert Oppenheimer.

But history could have played out very differently.

Back in 2014, creator Sam Shaw was assembling Manhattan, a limited TV drama centered on the same wartime race to build the atomic bomb. The series—critically admired but largely overlooked—never broke into the cultural mainstream. Its muted reception ensured it would be all but forgotten once Nolan’s film exploded onto screens nearly a decade later.

Behind the scenes, Shaw and his team cast their net wide when searching for their Oppenheimer. The process was unconventional: names from the music world were even floated. “I don’t think we can say that we ‘reached out’ to Beck, but yes, it was something to think about,” Shaw recalled. “We wanted Oppenheimer to feel like he had a certain undeniable charisma… but also that he was playing a different instrument. He needed to feel alien—or other—in some ways.”

Among the more serious contenders? Ebon Moss-Bachrach—and a certain Irish actor named Cillian Murphy. Shaw admitted Murphy was “100% on that list.”

Had Murphy taken the part, the trajectory of his career might have shifted entirely. Instead of inhabiting Nolan’s vast IMAX frames in a performance that would earn him an Academy Award, he might have quietly played Oppenheimer on cable TV, a role lost to the mists of prestige-drama obscurity.

It’s a tantalizing alternate history—one where Murphy’s defining role came too early, in the wrong medium, for an audience that wasn’t looking. Fate, it seems, had other plans. By turning down Manhattan, Murphy unknowingly preserved the role that would become his career-defining triumph.

Sometimes the right part isn’t just about finding the right actor. It’s about timing—and in Murphy’s case, the wait was worth it.

If you like, I can also draft a sidebar companion piece imagining what Murphy’s career might have looked like if he had taken that TV role in 2014, as a playful “alternate history” feature. That would make the article even richer.