Cillian Murphy

After cutting his teeth creatively as an amateur musician and later dropping out of law school, Irish-born Cillian Murphy segued into acting with an attention-grabbing performance in the stark, two-character stage drama "Disco Pigs." The surprise hit transformed Murphy's life, leading him on an almost two-year tour across Europe, Canada and Australia. He eventually landed his first film roles, mainly in British-made independents, before finally achieving international stardom with director Danny Boyle's post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller, "28 Days Later" (2002), which soon opened the doors to Hollywood. Following a small role in the Oscar-nominated "Cold Mountain" (2003), Murphy proved an able villain as the menacing Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" (2005) and a terrifying flight companion in the thriller "Red Eye" (2005). Though he drifted back into more independent-minded movies like Neil Jordan's "Breakfast on Pluto" (2005), Boyle's small-scale sci-fi adventure "Sunshine" (2007) and Sally Potter's comedy "The Party" (2017), Murphy was equally comfortable appearing in high-profile Hollywood films like Ron Howard's whaling drama "In the Heart of the Sea" (2015) and Nolan's World War II drama "Dunkirk" (2017).