Cillian Murphy turned to Oppenheimer’s cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema to help him with a scene in which he speaks Dutch.

In Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, the Peaky Blinders actor plays J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, and in one scene, he launches into a lecture in Dutch.

During an interview with Deadline, Murphy explained that he asked the Dutch DP to help him learn those lines.

“I remember saying to Chris, ‘So there’s this scene with a Dutch sequence in the script, how are we going to do that?’ And he said, ‘You mean how are you going to do that.’ And I went ‘Okay…'” Murphy recalled. “I asked Hoyte van Hoytema, who’s Dutch, to record it, and he recorded it and then I slowed it down so I just learned it phonetically over three months – I can still remember it.”

The Irish actor admitted that he only had “a vague conceptual grasp” on all the scientific terminology he had to say as the quantum physicist.

“(I said in Dutch) something about atoms,” he joked. “I had a vague conceptual grasp on all the science of the movie, but there’s no point in wasting time on that stuff because you can’t in six months even begin to have a grasp on quantum mechanics. My job was to go after the humanity. So that stuff becomes mechanical.”

The 47-year-old also revealed that he bonded with his co-star Matt Damon about writing complex mathematical equations on a chalkboard.

“There’s something very soothing about writing those equations. I was talking to Matt Damon about it as well, he did it in Good Will Hunting, and you just learn them and forget what they mean, but it’s very satisfying to write them,” he shared.

Oppenheimer is in cinemas now.

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