Nepo babies usually get roasted — Cillian Murphy's son is getting 'cutie pie' instead

Aran Murphy walked the red carpet at the London Film Festival premiere of Taika Waititi's Klara and the Sun on 15 October 2026. By the end of the night, r/popculturechat was passing round a clip in which he's asked whether he'd ever share the screen with his dad. His answer: "I don't know. Maybe, who knows… Not right now." The top comment, with more than 900 upvotes, skipped the answer entirely. He looks so much like his dad, it said, "what a cutie pie".

The film is his first big studio picture. He plays Rick, the best friend and next-door neighbour of Josie (Mia Tharia), in Sony's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, with Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams at the top of the bill. It opens in UK and US cinemas on 23 October. He's also on the telly right now as Ruairí, the troubled son of Sharon Horgan's divorcee in the HBO comedy Youth, which reached HBO Max in the UK and Ireland on 21 September.

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The nepo baby exemption

A famous surname on a call sheet is normally an open invitation. The internet has spent years grading the children of the famous, and most of them fail before they've said a line. Aran got rosy cheeks, mannerisms and a lot of affection instead. The thread's most sober reply worked out the rule:

"Can't help but notice how much people's opinions on nepo babies are just clearly based on how they feel about the parents as to whether this one's "acceptable" or not lol."

— top reply in the r/popculturechat thread

Which is fair enough. Everybody likes Cillian: the Oscar for Oppenheimer, Tommy Shelby, the famous reluctance to do anything resembling celebrity. The goodwill passes down with the cheekbones. Another commenter brought up Jack Quaid, who gets a pass because he openly admits his parents opened the door for him. Aran hasn't even been asked about any of that. He's been asked whether he looks like his dad.

Praised for the face, not the part

Nobody in that thread mentioned Rick. Nobody could, really: critics in London savaged Klara, with one-star reviews from the Guardian, the Telegraph and The Times and a Metacritic score of 23. So the debut will be remembered for the carpet, and the carpet was all about Cillian.

The internet isn't forgiving Aran Murphy for being a nepo baby. It's forgiving Cillian.

One of the thread's sharper commenters guessed that it must get tiring when every interview is about his dad, and that "at some point he probably wants the questions to focus on his own career too." On paper, there is a career to ask about:

• Stage: the one-boy play Hamnet, as a child.
• Film: Lola (2022), then Klara and the Sun.
• TV: Youth for HBO, and WAR, an HBO and Sky drama with Dominic West and Sienna Miller.

That's a working actor's list, not a famous face's list. Read that way, "Not right now" isn't shyness. A film with Cillian would make him Cillian's son in every review for a decade, and he seems to know it. His father's advice, he has told Bafta, is "always just trust your instinct". The instinct, apparently, says: not yet.

Klara and the Sun reaches cinemas on 23 October, and the Youth finale airs on 1 November. The cutie pie comments came free with the face. The next good review he'll have to earn himself.

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