Please stop asking Cillian Murphy about Barbie

The most recent outlet to push the Barbenheimer agenda is the Brazilian site Omelete, who referred to their Barbie question in a recent junket as “obligatory”—to which Christopher Nolan shot back an immediate “it’s not obligatory” and Cillian Murphy simply let out a resigned “okay.” These two are fed up, you guys. (For the sake of journalistic due diligence, we do have to say that Emily Blunt and Matt Damon got all doe-eyed and giggly at the same question and said they’d do anything with Greta Gerwig.)

So, anyway, now we know that Cillian Murphy would play a Ken in Barbie 2 because he just kind of had to say yes. “Sure, yeah. Let’s read the script, let’s have a conversation,” he said, before immediately turning the conversation to how promising the double-feature was for the movie industry as a whole. “I can’t wait to see the movie. I think it’s great for cinema to get all these great movies happening this summer,” he said.

This is really all a wash anyway because Greta Gerwig said Barbie 2 was almost definitely not happening (a blessing to all of us suffering from franchise fatigue) and even if it was, Murphy isn’t remotely a part of the Barbie cinematic universe, even though folks like to keep glossing over that bit. It’s a shame we won’t get any new, actually Oppenheimer-focused material out of this press tour due to the strike, but we’re filing a humble to skip the Barbie stuff when Murphy’s next junket rolls around and instead ask him more about learning 30,000 words of Dutch for a movie—something we’re sure he’d be thrilled to chat about in any language.