Murphy will instead return as Jim in the upcoming ’28 Days Later: The Bone Temple.’
As soon as the teaser trailer for 28 Years Later dropped, pretty much everyone and their mom assumed the skinny zombie seen struggling through flowers looked uncannily like Cillian Murphy’s Jim, the franchise’s original main character from director Danny Boyle and Alex Garland‘s 2002 28 Days Later. The internet sleuths swiftly discovered the likeness was pure serendipity, but the Oscar-winning actor now says he was touched that fans had assumed the emaciated undead wanderer was him.
In an interview with The Observer, Murphy said that, depsite being terminally offline himself, his son had made sure that he saw the skinny zombie everyone had assumed marked Jim’s grim return to the franchise.
“That’s great people think I look like a zombie cadaver,” Murphy said, dryly, as The Observer notes.
