Cillian Murphy’s Rise to Fame and Villain Arch as an Actor
Cillian Murphy has risen to fame as one of the greatest actors of his generation. The actor has seen the spotlight since 2005 when he performed as “Scarecrow” in the Batman series, and has continued to further his career, performing as the head physicist in “Oppenheimer.” Cillian Murphy has become a movie/series phenomenon in recent years because of his character development in films and his outstanding performance as a “villain.” People have become obsessed with Cillian Murphy because he continues to play a bad-ass character in every film.
The chart below represents Cillian Murphy’s villain page views from 2016 through 2024. The visualization illustrates the characters’ Cillian Murphy has played throughout the years, highlighting the series Peaky Blinders and the film Oppenheimer. The Peaky Blinders series is about a post-WWI British soldier that organizes a tough gang called “The Peaky Blinders,” known for cutting people’s eyes with razor blades. This series was filmed from 2013 through 2022, and had a major impact on Cillian Murphy’s growth as an actor and being seen as a villain. The “Cillian Murphy Villain Page Views” chart, shows major jumps in 2016, 2017, and 2020, which can be attributed to the actor’s villainous arch in the series. The graph also highlights Cillian Murphy’s role in Oppenheimer, showing a rise in villain page views after the film’s release in 2023. Cillian Murphy’s role as the head physicist of the atomic bomb, and later being accused as helping the Russian’s have access to information on how to construct an atomic bomb lead to him being seen as a villain in the film.
Following this, I analyzed four films/series depicting Cillian Murphy as the bad-ass character people love and aspire to be. Some of the films can be dated back almost twenty years and have been researched on Wikipedia consistently over the years. In the visualization below, I measured the number of views Batman Begins, Peaky Blinders, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer have received over the years, along with the number of times Cillian Murphy was viewed as a villain. The visualization shows the differences in the film/series page views, which can be attributed to popularity or performance of the actor, ranking as: Peaky Blinders, Batman Begins, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer.
Moving forward, I wanted to measure if the acting performance of Cillian Murphy was rated better in some of the cinemas compared to others by looking at the number of awards won. For this part of the research, I created a dictionary, adding each notable award to the correct film. The results of the data, shows awards won only for Peaky Blinders and Oppenheimer, which was surprising to see based on his acting performance in the other films.
The data visualization above previews Cillian Murphy’s performance as an actor through the awards he has won. In the four movies listed, the actor won twenty-six major awards for his performance in Oppenheimer and five major awards for the Peaky Blinders series. Cillian Murphy received no awards for Batman Begins or Dunkirk, but as you can see by the increase in his number of awards won over the years, these films had a major impact in his recognition as an actor.
The data regarding awards is also interesting because it differentiates from the expectation of awards won when looking at the Cillian Murphy Villain Films Page Views. In the villain page views, Peaky Blinders and Batman Begins received over two-thousand views consistently, whereas Oppenheimer reached over two-thousand views only twice. It is interesting to see that Cillian Murphy’s most renowned and award-winning role is his least-viewed page by Wikipedia users, since one of the most-viewed pages received no awards.
The reasoning behind Batman Begins receiving more page views through the years compared to Oppenheimer could be due to the release date of the films. Oppenheimer was released in 2023, which would make it understandable why there are minimal page views for Oppenheimer prior to 2023. Although, when Oppenheimer was released in 2023, and Cillian Murphy won twenty-six major awards, Oppenheimer passed the Dunkirk page views (shown above), but still had significantly less page views than Batman Begins and Peaky Blinders. There is no surprise that the Peaky Blinders series received the most page views due to popularity, but Batman Begins was released almost twenty years ago, making it surprising that Oppenheimer received less views.
Through further research, I realized the dramatic difference between Cillian Murphy’s Batman Begins and Oppenheimer page views could be because of the association with award-winning actor Christian Bale. The visualization below visualizes Christian Bale’s page views of the film Batman Begins, which ranges from 2,000 to over 15,000 views every year. My theory is that people visiting Christian Bale’s page could be directed to Cillian Murphy’s page while researching the film Batman Begins. This would result in more page views of Batman Begins for Cillian Murphy, which could be the reason why the film consistently has more views than Oppenheimer.
My research illustrates the growth of Cillian Murphy as an actor and his prominent role as a villain in films. The actor never disappoints and has continued to gage an audience, shown by the consistent views of his Wikipedia page. It was interesting to note that the Wikipedia site’s navigation system can significantly influence page views, as demonstrated by the consistently high views from Cillian Murphy’s Batman Begins page, which benefits from being associated with Christian Bale’s page.
