Johnny Murphy: The Irishman who helped create the zombies on The Last Of Us
Johnny Murphy, left, and some of the prosthetics he was involved in creating for The Last Of Us.
As a youngster, Johnny Murphy developed a fascination with the other-worldly prosthetics sported by movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2.
Younger him couldn’t have known then, but he would go on to work in that field at the highest level, bringing movie magic to our screens.
Earlier this month, the Westmeath man’s talents were rewarded when he and his colleagues won the Creative Emmy award for their work on smash-hit series The Last of Us. Prosthetic makeup artist Murphy worked on the series starring Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal, the latest goal achieved in his career.
Murphy was a fan of the game which inspired the show and said to wife Melissa Groome Murphy that it had strong TV potential. He and fellow Westmeath native Melissa, who also works in prosthetics, both ended up working on the subsequent show.
“It's been incredible,” he said of the experience. “I played the game when it came out originally. I always said to my wife Melissa at the time that narratively it would make an incredible television series. That it would be amazing to work on just because of the creatures and things like the Clickers.
“I never thought that I would actually get to work on it. When they offered me the job for The Last of Us it was to go to Canada and I was gobsmacked and straight away I said: ‘Yes. Put me on a plane, now!’
“It's been an incredible show to work on, amazing crew across all the departments,” he said of the experience. “There are about seven or eight of us in Canada doing the day to day stuff on set and building stuff in the workshop. But [makeup effects company] BGFX in the UK had upwards of maybe 70 people, making loads and loads of incredible work that was sent out to us as well, so it's been a massive effort.”
Murphy’s work involves making prosthetic models but his work is as varied as it is intricate. “We do everything from taking life casts of the actors, sculpting the prosthetic appliances, making moulds of them, running the actual appliances themselves, then applying them to the actors on set and maintaining them for the shooting days. Then we make dead bodies, fake animals, fake limbs and bodies and everything in between.
“I don't think there's a better feeling than something you've worked on for weeks and weeks and seeing it on set, on camera and knowing that millions of people around the world are going to see this thing that I made and hopefully it'll look good. That's the reason I got into it in the first place, just to be part of the movie magic.”
Creating such striking and convincing prosthetic makeup takes time as well as artistry, and Murphy and his colleagues could work for months on a prosthetic, usually starting work on a production long before the cast begins filming.
“It can take anything from a couple of weeks to a couple of months to make some of the things that we make. It's a long process - we often start a long time before the film or the television programme starts shooting, we might be there for 10 or 12 weeks beforehand.
"We sculpt these things by hand. The creations we have that have hair, they're inserted hair by hair. You can spend weeks and weeks on something that could be on camera for two or three seconds.”
As a boy growing up in Ballinagore in Co Westmeath, Murphy would watch in wonder with parents Tim and Noeleen as movie stars weaved their magic onscreen. It fed into a creative interest that was already being honed - he was interested in arts and crafts since as long as he could remember, while his father was also an artist.
“It was what I gravitated towards more than anything else, really. I did lots of art and crafts with my dad when I was young. He taught me how to do it because he's an artist himself - he does wood carving and woodwork.
“I was always fascinated with movies that had this kind of work in it, like Jurassic Park. The big thing that I was inspired by when I was a kid was Terminator 2 with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I had all the models of him and used to sculpt little heads of him. I always wanted to do it, but I never thought that I could get to do it.”
On completing secondary school, Murphy did a portfolio course at Moate Business College and considered studying fine arts or painting until his most-loved creative urge took over. He took a course in model making at Dun Laoghaire’s Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Initially, he struggled to get on the work ladder, until meeting an established talent in the field.
“I got very lucky because a man called Nick Dudman, who did all of the creature effects for all the Harry Potter films, Star Wars and stuff like that, was filming a series called Penny Dreadful in Ireland. He brought me in for a two week trial. I've been working on and off with him now for the last 10 years. I owe a lot to him.”
Years later, Murphy is working at the highest level, and was thrilled with the Creative Emmy award for the HBO series that showed on Sky in Ireland.
“To be honest, it was very surreal. I knew we definitely had a good chance with the show. The calibre of the work that everybody had done was so high that it was very hard to tell what was going to get it and when I heard, it was just kind of overwhelming. It’s been incredible.”
- The Last Of Us is available on Sky Now. Season two has been commissioned
Filmmaker Alexander Payne is reunited with his Sideways star Paul Giamatti for this drama about a teacher tasked with spending Christmas with his pupils.
Jodie Comer is as reliably good as ever in a London-set drama about a new mother navigating a catastrophe.
Tina Fey pens the screenplay for the big-screen adaptation of the Broadway musical.
Emma Stone is terrific in filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’s strange and mischievous take on a female Frankenstein.
Kevin Hart and Gugu Mbatha-Raw lead a gang attempting to pull off a brazen heist during a mid-air flight.
