Clip of 'Oppenheimer' star correcting Prince Harry is altered

Published on July 27, 2023 at 16:59
2 min read
By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA

A video shared widely online claims to show Prince Harry insisting that actor Cillian Murphy is British, prompting the "Oppenheimer" star to respond, "No I'm Irish." But the clip is manipulated; the footage comes from 2017, when the Duke of Sussex met the cast of "Dunkirk," while the audio is ripped from a 2010 interview with Murphy and Tom Hardy, who were playing major roles in "Inception."

"Prince Harry got schooled," says a July 26, 2023 post from far-right blogger Ian Miles Cheong, who has previously spread other disinformation from his account on Twitter, which is rebranding as "X."

Screenshot from Twitter taken July 26, 2023

The video, complete with subtitles spelling out the dialogue, appears to show Harry asking Murphy if he is British. The supposed conversation continues as follows:

Murphy: "No, I'm Irish."

Harry: "Yeah, I know, British."

Murphy: "No, no, no. I'm Irish. It's a big difference."

Posts sharing the video spread across platforms in the days following the highly anticipated release of director Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer," a Hollywood blockbuster about an American physicist who was pivotal to the development of the first nuclear weapons.

Murphy -- who previously starred in the British drama series "Peaky Blinders" as well as other Nolan films "Dunkirk" and "Inception" -- plays the eponymous J. Robert Oppenheimer in the movie.

But the clip has been altered, dubbing audio from more than 13 years ago over unrelated footage to create the impression of a spat.

Reverse image and keyword searches revealed the footage (archived here) dates to the July 2017 premiere of "Dunkirk," a historical thriller about the evacuation of Allied soldiers from Dunkirk, France.

AFP found the audio, meanwhile, in a clip shared as early as July 2010 in a Hebrew-language YouTube video (archived here). The video relates to the movie "Inception," which was released that month, and shows Murphy seated for an interview alongside English actor Tom Hardy.

In the original video, Hardy is the one who says, "It's a big difference."

The earliest iteration of the altered video AFP found came in a July 22 post from a user who later wrote: "I made the video this morning on CapCut and yes I stole the audio from that Tom Hardy Inception interview." CapCut is an online video editing tool.

AFP has debunked other videos featuring manipulated audio, including here, here and here.

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