Cillian Murphy loves the Nolan movies he’s not in because he doesn’t have to look at his own ears

Here’s an interesting debate for the Christopher Nolan fans out there to have: Are his movies without Cillian Murphy better than his movies with Cillian Murphy? On the one side you have his pre-Batman movies, The Prestige, Interstellar, and Tenet, but on the other you have his Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer. Both have a nice mix of (ahem) prestige and fun genre romps, one has three Christian Bale movies while the other has two Christian Bales, one has slightly more Kenneth Branagh than the other… it’s an impossible choice for most of us, but Murphy himself definitely seems to have a preference.

While talking to The Independent in an interview conducted before the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike, Murphy was asked which Christopher Nolan movie he wishes he could’ve been in, and Murphy quickly responded with Interstellar—the seemingly cold, hard sci-fi story that ultimately reveals itself to be about the power of love. Murphy says the movie is “so emotional,” explaining that he saw it in the theater when his kids were little and that it had a “big impact” on him because of that. “It broke my heart,” he added, before dropping the reveal that inspired this “Cillian Or No Cillian” debate: “I love watching his films when I’m not in them because you don’t have to freak out about the size of your ears or whatever.”

And that brings us to another important debate: Does Cillian Murphy have weird ears? Are they disproportionately big? Is he using that as an example of something that someone would be self-conscious about while watching their own acting work, or is he actually self-conscious about it? We know he’s got those blue eyes and those cheekbones, but we’ve never looked at his ears before. Now we can’t stop! We’re Googling “Cillian Murphy ears,” we’re putting up one of those serial killer boards with photos of his face at different angles, comparing his ears to, like, Ryan Gosling and Richard Belzer.

Is this Inception? Did Cillian Murphy plant this idea in our heads and now we’re going to break up our father’s company?