It’s no spoiler that Cillian Murphy is returning to the hit zombie series that made him a household name more than 20 years ago in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Danny Boyle, who gave the actor his breakout role in 28 Days Later, has revealed the information after the actor didn’t feature prominently in last year’s sequel 28 Years Later (no, it turns out he wasn’t a haggard zombie rising out of a field).
But if you don’t want to know how or when he’ll appear in Nia DaCosta’s bloody sequel — in theaters with Sony Pictures — you might want to stop reading now.
Murphy will indeed return to The Bone Temple, reprising his role as Jim, the famous bicycle courier who woke up from a coma in 2001 to find London devastated by the Rage Virus. But it’s at the very end of the new film, in a decidedly quieter scene that dramatically calms the tone from the violent mayhem of the previous 90 minutes. For director Nia DaCosta, who worked on the film from a script by Alex Garland, that was exactly what she wanted to achieve.
“Because this is not a big moment in the ‘Return of the Superheroes’ series,” she explained to Variety. “It’s the return of the bike messenger.”
After reaching the climax of a long and escalating period of madness involving Ralph Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson, Jack O’Connell’s Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, and Chee Lewis-Parry’s alpha zombie Samson, the film abruptly shifts to an entirely new setting, showing Murphy’s Jim living in relative safety, perhaps the same secluded villa left at the end of 28 Days Later. A quarter of a century later, he now has a daughter (who we saw helping her prepare for a history exam).
“The fact that Alex had written a letter to his daughter teaching her history and that she wanted to bring him back into the story, I thought, ‘Okay, that’s how we’re going to shoot it,'” DaCosta says. “So it’s grounded. It’s not this big, bombastic moment. And I think just watching him is powerful enough.”
Indeed, at early screenings, it was so powerful that the audience cheered.
As it happens, viewers may have recognized Murphy’s voice earlier. When DaCosta was thinking about the title sequence for “The Bone Temple” and how to introduce the new film’s name on screen, she decided she needed to expand on scenes from the past. “So we did it with sound. The sound you hear is the sound of Killian saying ‘hello’ in the first movie,” she says. “So he actually shows up pretty early in the movie.”
Fans of the series may also take their hats off to its origins with the subsequent, much-publicized revelation with Murphy that DaCosta used the eerie original song “In a Heartbeat,” which John Murphy composed for 28 Days Later.
“That was the biggest franchising effort we made,” she says.
Much like the final scene of 28 Years Later, which introduced O’Connell’s Crystal, the final act of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple with Murphy strongly hints at things to come. Thankfully, Sony has already given the green light for a sequel, and Garland has returned to writing.
DaCosta claims that he had “a lot of fun” making the film (he also admitted that it was “100%” a reaction to Marvel’s big MCU hit and subsequent adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda). But sadly, whether she wants to return to directing her next film has little to do with it.
She said: “Danny called Dib.”
