Danny Boyle confirms Cillian Murphy features in ’28 Years Later’

Posted On April 1, 2025April 1, 2025

Danny Boyle has confirmed that Cillian Murphy will return for the hotly anticipated third instalment of his zombie franchise, 28 Years Later.

Boyle announced the news at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on March 31st. The director took to the stage as part of Sony Pictures’ presentation to share the next trailer for the film, set to be released this summer. This news comes despite previous rumours that Murphy would not star.

The English filmmaker revealed that 28 Years Later would mark the beginning of a new trilogy in the series, 23 years after the original film’s release in 2002. A fourth movie, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, has already been shot and is slated for release in 2026.

However, the director then admitted that the upcoming instalment for this year still needed to be financed.

Alongside Murphy returning as his character Jim to face the zombies are a star-studded cast consisting of Ralph Fiennes, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, and Jack O’Connell.

Screen Rant reports that in the trailer, spanning across an island, a voiceover ominously says: “Many people dead… infected and non-infected alike. Once you walk onto that mainland, there’s no rescue,” as Johnson is seen running with a young boy away from said infected zombies.

As the title suggests, the film is set 28 years after the original outbreak of the Rage Virus in the franchise, allowing audiences to see how the characters have fared in the apocalypse after all this time.

Boyle then urged audiences to “support the apocalypse” when the film hits cinemas in a few months’ time.

For Murphy, he returns to his seminal role at a peak time in his career, where among other projects he is set to reprise his part as Thomas Shelby in the Netflix film An Immortal Man, a spinoff of the smash hit drama Peaky Blinders.

28 Years Later will be released in cinemas on June 20th, 2025.

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