Sure, that one creepy infected dude in the 28 Years Later trailer kinda looks like Cillian Murphy, but it ain’t him. Promise! We’ve known for a while that he wouldn’t be reprising his role as Jim in Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s long-awaited sequel, but he will be showing up in the next two movies. In a new interview with Variety, the duo reveal the size of Murphy’s role in Nia DaCosta’s upcoming sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and in the third movie…
“[Murphy] appears briefly in Nia’s film,” Boyle confirmed. “I don’t think that’s giving too much away, and our plan is that he will be an enormous character in the third film in the way that Jack O’Connell’s character — who you see briefly at the end of the first film — is an enormous character with Ralph Fiennes in the next film.”
Boyle’s comments also confirm that Ralph Fiennes’ role as Dr. Kelson continues into the next movie, which makes sense if you’ve seen what he’s up to in 28 Years Later.
Murphy played the protagonist Jim in 2002’s 28 Days Later. He was one of the first characters to encounter the rage virus, and it’ll be interesting to see where he is now and how he figures into the story. Garland admitted that the script for the third movie is unfinished…
“The script isn’t written. It’s strange: there’s a story, there’s a plan, there’s a structure. These three films are in some ways distinct from each other, in other ways interrelated, because there are characters that have a through line throughout all of them, although they are also essentially separate stories. It makes it, in filmmaking terms, have something in common with television. Both Danny and I have worked at some point on television, and TV has a slightly more organic element about the way things can unfold. So people might write a whole story arc, but then they will discover in the shooting how that story arc really lands.”
In my review, I comment that 28 Years Later isn’t so much a horror movie as it is a coming-of-age story. Garland talks about the tone of this new trilogy and how it keeps changing…
“I think that, having written the first one, in many ways I didn’t know at that point what the film would be, because there’s a whole set of discoveries left to uncover. The same is also true with the second film. So I had to understand something about what Ralph Fiennes is going to create with Danny, to be able to lean to that. There is always a gap between the thing that exists on the page, as it’s gone through the filter of many people’s imaginations and agendas and preoccupations, and then again in the edit.”
While DaCosta’s film is set to open on January 16th 2026, the third movie is undated and could be a while. Garland adds…
“So short answer: I’ve got the idea, I’ve got the plan, but there’s not a script. I’m waiting to see what happens, I suppose.”
