Cillian Murphy can roll with the punches.
The Irish actor got up on stage at Sunday night’s Golden Globes to accept his award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture ― Drama for his performance in Oppenheimer with a smear of lipstick on his face.
Moments earlier when the win was announced, his wife, Irish artist Yvonne McGuinness — who was wearing red lipstick — had grabbed his face and planted one on him. She gave his face a hasty (and ineffective) wipe with her hand before he made his way to the stage.
“First question: do I have lipstick all over my nose?” Murphy began his speech.
“Yes!” people in the audience shouted.
“I’m just going to leave it,” he decided.
It was Murphy’s first Globes win, for his performance as theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s biographical thriller.
“One of the most beautiful and vulnerable things about being an actor is that you can’t do it on your own, really. And we have the most incredible ensemble cast in this movie. There was magic and some of them are here today,” he said, shouting out co-stars Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon and Gary Oldman.
After thanking Nolan, producers, the studio, his representatives and colleagues, he celebrated his fellow nominees for their “stunning work.”
He finished with a nod to his family.
“To my family, I’m the luckiest man. I love you. Thanks so much,” he said.
Murphy and McGuiness have been married for twenty years. They share two sons, Malachy, 18, and Aran, 16.
The Peaky Blinders star has kept his marriage and children very much out of the spotlight over the years.
“I have an amazing wife,” he told GQ in 2019, “and I couldn’t do this without her and her understanding. But it is a struggle. I think it is for any dad whose work takes him away, which it generally does, and which consumes him, which my work does.”
Fans couldn’t get enough of the moment at the Globes. Check out how they reacted below.