Cillian Murphy’s ’28 Years Later’ Return: Nia DaCosta Chose a ‘Grounded’ Scene Over a ‘Big Return of the Superhero Moment’ in ‘The Bone Temple’

It’s no spoiler that Cillian Murphy makes his return to the hit zombie franchise that made his name more than two decades on in “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.” Danny Boyle, who gave the actor his big screen break in “28 Days Later,” revealed the info after the actor notably failed to show up in last year’s sequel “28 Years Later” (it turned out that, no, he wasn’t the emaciated zombie seen rising from a field).

But those who don’t want to know how and when he appears in Nia DaCosta‘s blood-soaked sequel to the sequel — in cinemas with Sony Pictures — may want to stop reading now.

Murphy does indeed return in “The Bone Temple,” reprising his role as Jim, the bicycle courier who famously woke up from a coma to find a London deserted and devastated by the Rage virus back in 2001. But it’s not until right at the very end of the new film — and in a distinctly quiet scene that calms the tone down dramatically from the wildly unhinged mayhem seen over the previous 90 minutes. For director Nia DaCosta, working from Alex Garland’s script, that was entirely the point of what she hoped to achieve.

“Because it’s not a big ‘return of the superhero’ franchise moment,” she explains to Variety. “It’s the return of the bike messenger.”

After reaching the climax of a prolonged and escalating period of madness with Ralph Fiennes’ Dr Kelson, Jack O’Connell’s Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal and Chi Lewis-Parry’s Alpha zombie Samson, the film makes a sudden shift to a whole new setting, showing Murphy’s Jim living in relative isolated safety, quite possibly in the same remote cottage he was left at the end of “28 Days Later.” A quarter century on and he now has a daughter (who he’s seen helping prepare for a history exam).

“The fact that Alex wrote him teaching his daughter history and that’s how he wanted to introduce him back into the story, I was like, ok, so that’s how we shoot it,” DaCosta says. “So it’s grounded. It’s not this big, bombastic moment. And I think it’s powerful enough just to see him.”

It was certainly powerful enough to have audiences erupt into cheers in early screenings.

As it happens, audiences may have recognized Murphy’s voice much earlier. As DaCosta was figuring out the title sequence of “The Bone Temple” and how to introduce the name of the new film on screen, she decided that what she needed to do was deploy a scene from the past. “So we did it with sound, and the sound you hear is Cillian’s from the first film saying ‘Hello’,” she says. “So he actually appears in the film very early on.”

Fans of the franchise may also note a hat tip to it’s origins in the big reveal with Murphy later on, with DaCosta using the original eerie track “In a Heartbeat,” composed by John Murphy for “28 Days Later.”

“That was the biggest franchise-y thing we did,” she says.

Much like the final scene in “28 Years Later” that introduced O’Conell’s Crystal, the last act in “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” with Murphy heavily suggests that there’s more to come. Thankfully, Sony has already greenlit a follow-up, with Garland back on writing duties.

DaCosta claims it was “so much fun” making the film (and also admits it was “100%” a reaction to having made a major MCU tentpole in “The Marvels” and then an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda”). But sadly it’s largely irrelevant whether or not she’d want to come back to direct the next one.

As she notes: “Danny called dibs.”