28 Years Later director Danny Boyle has said that Cillian Murphy will reprise his role from the first movie in the next instalment of the zombie franchise early next year.
The Cork-born actor played motorcycle courier Jim in 2002's 28 Days Later and Boyle and writer Alex Garland have another two movies planned for the series, both of which will feature Oscar winner Murphy.
It follows speculation that the Peaky Blinders and Oppenheimer star would be back in the latest part of the franchise, 28 Years Later, which stars newcomer Alife Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jodie Comer, and is in cinemas now.
Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, the 68-year-old Boyle, who also made Trainspotting, Yesterday, and Slumdog Millionaire, said, "It’s all linked to Cillian. He is a producer on this new film, 28 Years Later, and with his agreement, we didn’t connect directly to that first film from 2002."
The fourth part of the series, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, is due for release next January and there is also a fifth and final movie planned, with Boyle back behind the camera.
"Cillian’s character, Jim, will reappear and in fact he will appear at the end of The Bone Temple to take us into the fifth film and that will be his film, really," Boyle said. "28 years have passed and something is the same and something is very different. That’s all I can tell you . . . "
So, Cillian will be back? "Oh, he will be!"
Review: Glory and gory be! 28 Years Later is a triumph
28 Years Later is set on an isolated island in the northeast of England where a small community has continued to live uninfected as the rest of the Britain remains quarantined and contaminated by the Rage virus which turns people into a manic state.
The new movie centres on 12-year-old Spike (Williams) and his parents, Isla (Comer) and Jamie (Taylor-Johnson), a scavenger and survivalist who takes his son on his first sortie to the mainland to make his first zombie kill.
It is essentially a movie about a father and son relationship. "Yes, it is but it is flawed," says Boyle. "Jamie and Spike’s relationship is intense but it is quite narrow in a way. Jamie wants to teach Spike quite specific skills but they are very gender-based and quite strict.
"The girls are left at home and the boys are taken out to train and they have a nostalgia about when England was great and the long bowmen beat the French at Agincourt . . . Spike learns different lessons from his mother and, later, from Ralph Fiennes’ character."
A lot has changed since the first movie in the franchise back in 2002.
Given the new film’s themes of not so splendid isolation and a virus that has left Britain cut off from the rest of Europe, the tumults of Brexit and Covid were an irresistible framing device for Boyle and Garland.
"It’s definitely influenced by that," Boyle says. "You can’t not be influenced by that but this is a not a political film about Brexit or a political film about Covid but they do pass through the film at times.
"One of the wonderful things about the horror genre is that you can read things in that feel like the present day, like what’s happening in Gaza or the way migrants are treated.
"Covid had a particular influence on us and it’s a slightly surprising one. It’s not that cities were transformed in the way we saw at the beginning of 28 Days Later. It was the way behaviour changed over time after the initial alert, which was high scale panic and worry."
Boyle adds, "People start to relax after that and they start to take risks and branch out and don’t wear a mask all the time. It’s just human nature to do it."
Of course, Garland and Boyle do not forget the gore. The zombies in this franchise are not quite the shambling undead of B-movie yore but fleet-footed berserkers who pose real and immediate danger.
And in 28 Years Later, Boyle and Garland give us two new breeds of zombie - the sluggish "Slow-Lows" and super-fast and strong Alphas. It seems that as time passes, the half-dead are evolving.
"That again was a Covid thing," Boyle says. "We saw how Covid mutated and the variants arrived and in this film the variants that have emerged are very dangerous indeed and if anything, the landscape is more hostile and dangerous than the first film."
It’s been a busy few days in Dublin for Boyle. As well as doing press duties for 28 Years Later, he also attended the gala opening of his new movie at the Irish Film Centre and was given UCD’s Literary and Historical Society James Joyce Award.
No doubt he talked about his new film’s star - 12-year-old newcomer Alife Williams, who plays Spike.
"When we cast him, his shoe size was 6, by the time we finished the film, his shoe size was nine-and-a-half," laughs Boyle. "I kid you not."
"He’s transforming from a boy into a man, which is what happens in the film so he is perfectly cast. He was exceptionally accommodated by the other actors who passed on their knowledge to him - wittingly and unwittingly.
"They were all wonderful actors, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes but Alfie has great talent himself."
28 Years Later is in cinemas now
