This article contains major spoilers from 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.\n<\/p>\n
Ahead of the 28 Years Later premiere, fans of the Danny Boyle- and Alex Garland-spearheaded horror saga were convinced<\/a> they discovered Cillian Murphy<\/a>‘s cameo in the legacyquel. One particular infected standing in a field, as glimpsed in the first trailer<\/a>, had apparent physical similarities to Murphy, who starred in the original, 2002’s 28 Days Later<\/a>, as bike messenger Jim.\n<\/p>\n Nia DaCosta, the director of this month’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, remembers this online reaction well. “I actually thought it was hilarious,” the filmmaker comments to Entertainment Weekly. “When the internet runs with something, to me it’s a good thing because it proves how you can’t trust anything online.”\n<\/p>\n It’s only funnier in hindsight because DaCosta knew the truth of Murphy’s role in the new 28 Years Later trilogy, and it kicks off at the end of her movie.\n<\/p>\n When last we saw Murphy’s Jim at the end of the original film, he and two other survivors, Hannah (Megan Burns) and Selena (Naomie Harris), caught the attention of a Finnish jet, which requested a helicopter to ferry them to mainland Europe, 28 days after the outbreak of the rage virus.\n<\/p>\n Without any teases or overt build-up in The Bone Temple, the new film’s ending sequence reveals Jim now living in a small house somewhere in the English countryside with his daughter, Sam (Maiya Eastmond), whom he’s homeschooling. The scene begins during one of his lessons but pivots outside when Jim and Sam rush to find Erin Kellyman’s “Jimmy Ink” and Alfie Williams’ Spike, chased by infected off in the distance.\n<\/p>\n Cillian Murphy as Jim in 2002’s ’28 Days Later’.<\/p>\n Peter Mountain\/Fox Searchlight<\/p>\n Sam asks her father if they should help, to which he replies, “We help them.”\n<\/p>\n DaCosta loves that last line in the movie, as Garland wrote it. “That’s what this whole thing is about,” she says. “What do we choose to do? How we choose to live and choosing good.”\n<\/p>\n This all leads into the third 28 Years Later movie and the end of this trilogy. Ahead of The Bone Temple’s release in theaters, press reported Sony is moving ahead with the next installment, with Murphy in talks to return<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n “I wanted it to reflect the domesticity that was on the page,” DaCosta says of Murphy’s grand entrance. “He is making toast and tea for his daughter, he’s teaching her history, and they live in a cottage in the Lake District in the post-apocalypse. The least important part of that is the post-apocalypse in terms of how it needs to look. And also, this is a punk-rock, metal series of films…. When you think of franchise filmmaking, you don’t think about movies like this.\u00a0So I wanted to stay true to that, as well. I didn’t want it to be like, ‘Here comes the hero on his horse.’ No, this is f—ing bike messenger Jim. He can barely run up some stairs in the first film. Now he’s a dad. And so I wanted to present him that way.”\n<\/p>\n Because of the way DaCosta shot the scene, Eastmond’s Sam is the first person we see. The director and Boyle \u2014 who helmed 28 Years Later as well as the original, and produces all the movies \u2014 had a general understanding that he would cast any role that’s most prominent in his films, while DaCosta would do the same for any prominent part in The Bone Temple. Though she ultimately left the Sam casting to Boyle.\n<\/p>\n Cillian Murphy as Jim in ’28 Days Later’.<\/p>\n Peter Mountain\/Fox Searchlight<\/p>\n