As soon as the teaser trailer for 28 Years Later dropped, pretty much everyone and their mom assumed the skinny zombie seen struggling through flowers looked uncannily like Cillian Murphy’s Jim, the franchise’s original main character from director Danny Boyle and Alex Garland‘s 2002 28 Days Later. The internet sleuths swiftly discovered the likeness was pure serendipity, but the Oscar-winning actor now says he was touched that fans had assumed the emaciated undead wanderer was him.
In an interview with The Observer, Murphy said that, depsite being terminally offline himself, his son had made sure that he saw the skinny zombie everyone had assumed marked Jim’s grim return to the franchise.
“That’s great people think I look like a zombie cadaver,” Murphy said, dryly, as The Observer notes. “It’s very flattering.”
Shortly after Sony Pictures debunked the rumor that the zombie was Murphy, model and actor Angus Neill revealed that he was the Murphy look-alike under all the makeup. According to The Guardian, Neill was “talent spotted by Bolye, who was much struck by his distinctive looks.” Those looks are that Neill is tall and gaunt with sharp cheekbones—all good things to have for cinematic purposes.
“Danny told me he’d always had me in mind for the role,” Neill told The Guardian. “So we met up, hit it off, and I agreed to take part … On set he has an extraordinary ability to hypnotize you, and working with him on the film was a very, very intense experience.”
But hey, just because Murphy wasn’t the zombie everyone thought he was, he is still set to come back to the franchise as bicycle courier Jim in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which also stars Ralph Fiennes and Jack O’Connell. Though Murphy has cautioned fans to temper their expectations for his part in the film, telling The Observer, he’s “only in it for a little bit” at the end of the movie. Still, Murphy did tease that his return is all in service of setting up an even bigger role in a future film.
“Everyone’s got to go and see the second one,” Murphy said. “I’m sure they will—it’s really, really good.”
In io9’s review for 28 Years Later, we said it was an incredibly tense, thoroughly fascinating zombie tale, writing, “While the ending isn’t as strong as the rest of the film, thankfully, this is the first film of a proposed trilogy, the second of which is out in January. We can’t wait to go back. There’s still so, so much to chew on.”
In the meantime, folks can look forward to streaming 28 Years Later when it arrives on Netflix on September 20. The sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, hits theaters January 16, 2026.