60 Minutes - 12/29/2024: Cuban Spycraft, Nvidia, Finding Cillian Murphy

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

For decades, prolific Cuban spies working in the U.S. government, serving in high profile positions with top security clearances, have evaded American intelligence officials. Correspondent Cecilia Vega reports from Washington, D.C. and Miami on the stories of two such undercover agents, former U.S. Ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha and onetime Pentagon official Ana Montes. Cuba continues to supply one of the most dangerous exports to American adversaries around the world: American secrets.  This year, computer chip maker Nvidia soared to the top of the stock market, briefly surpassing Apple as the world’s most valuable public company. Nvidia ushered in the artificial intelligence revolution with its groundbreaking software and graphics processing unit, a chip that enables AI by accelerating the processing power of computers. Correspondent Bill Whitaker meets Nvidia’s CEO and co-founder, Jensen Huang, to discuss the company’s innovations and the rapidly expanding range of AI applications, including drug development, weather pattern prediction, and more.  Ahead of last year's Academy Awards, correspondent Scott Pelley joined enigmatic actor Cillian Murphy in Ireland for a candid interview before winning Best Actor in the blockbuster film OPPENHEIMER. Pelley talked to the Oscar winner about how he transforms for roles, acts on instinct, and how his Irish identity has defined him. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Tonight, the story of two Americans with top security clearances and how they spied on behalf of Cuba, which bartered and sold America's

secrets to its enemies around the world. Do you think there are other Anamanteses in the government right now? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's chilling. There's no doubt that the Cubans are still penetrating our government with individuals who are loyal to them and not to us. NVIDIA has had a blistering ride to the top of the stock market. Bill, look at this.

How does NVIDIA's technology make artificial intelligence possible? Who are you? I am Fiona, a representation of Mother Nature. It does quadrillions of calculations a second. It's just insane numbers. And medical researchers and high-tech companies tell us this technology will affect our lives in ways we can only imagine. This is wild.

Yeah. 5,000 miles from Hollywood, Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy prefers a beach to a red carpet. But his Oscar win brings a blinding light to an artist who'd rather disappear. Emily Blunt told me, half-joking, your interview with Killian will be a disaster. Is this going to be a disaster? I don't, I hope not. We'll find out.

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm Scott Pelley.

Those stories and, in our last minute, a tribute to President Jimmy Carter. Tonight on 60 Minutes. In April, a career American ambassador pleaded guilty to spying for the intelligence service of Cuba. Victor Manuel Rocha served his country in positions that required the highest levels of security clearance. For 40 years, he was a covert agent. Before Ambassador Rocha was exposed, there was another prolific Cuban spy named Ana Montes, a Pentagon official who was the lead analyst on Cuba policy. She spied for 17 years. But Cuban spycraft isn't just a relic of the Cold War.

It's a real and present danger to U.S. national security. As we first reported this spring, it turns out Cuba's main export isn't cigars or rum. It's American secrets, which they barter and sell to America's enemies around the world. It was 1999, and then First Lady Hillary Clinton danced with the president of Argentina at a state dinner. President Clinton also danced the tango across the White House ballroom. There in front, wearing glasses and the airs of an aristocrat, stood Victor Manuel Rocha. He was the number two diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires,

with an impeccable reputation as a senior statesman on Latin America. He served on the National Security Council and became the ambassador to Bolivia, seen here alongside that country's president. All that time while having the highest top-secret security clearance with access to the most sensitive U.S. intelligence. But last December, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Rocha's arrest. He was charged with spying for Cuba for his entire career. This action exposes one of the highest reaching and longest lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent. In 2022, a man claiming to be a Cuban intelligence officer contacted Rocha and asked to meet. Rocha agreed. He had no idea the man was an undercover FBI agent.

Over three meetings in Miami, the FBI recorded Rocha with a hidden camera. And according to the complaint, Rocha bragged that he got away with decades of spying by memorizing the secrets he stole. Rocha told the agent, what we have done, it's enormous, more than a grand slam. He called the U.S., quote, the enemy. What do you think is the extent of damage that he did to national security? Manuel Rocha did enormous damage to American security. Brian Littell was the CIA's top Cuba analyst at the height of the Cold War. He says in the 1980s, Rocha cold

called and struck up a professional relationship. They remained friends for decades. You think he approached you to get information out of you, ultimately? Yes. He never got any. Did you see any signs that he was leading a double life? None. None? None. What can you tell me about the trade craft that Cuba uses? They do it very, very well in mostly rudimentary fashions. The Cubans are not flying satellites anywhere in the world. Nearly all of their ability and success has been in the dimension of human intelligence. Their officers, their intelligence agents and officers, are very, very good. They know their tradecraft.

They practice it with great skill and with discipline. And when they recruit, they're very careful about how they recruit and how they communicate. And what does Cuba do with the information it gets from all of these spies? They have no scruples about sharing the information or perhaps marketing it, selling it to other countries. The Russians, maybe the Chinese.

If they collect information about U.S. intentions, policy intentions, toward Moscow or Beijing or Tehran, it would be of interest to those countries. That was this man's job when he was a Cuban intelligence officer, decoding messages intercepted from the U.S. Jose Cohen defected in 1994. Cuba shared that information with enemies of the United States, he told us. Countries like the Soviet Union for years, countries like North Korea, countries like Iran, had information about the operation of the Defense Department.

You say Cuba may not have the weapons, Cuba may not have the arms, but they sell these secrets to the enemies of the United States. The strongest enemies of the United States? JOSE COHEN, The strongest enemies of the United States. All of that was what made me realize this is a battle between good and evil. Cuba was at the service of all the enemies of the United States. After Jose Cohen set foot on U.S. soil, he shared a vital piece of information with the FBI. That led to the investigation of more than 100 suspected Cuban agents and illegal officers,

and ultimately one very important spy. Cohen handed over an encryption key like this one, used by Cuban spies to send and receive secret messages with Havana. Three nights a week, at 9 p.m. and then again at 10, a series of numbered codes was broadcast out of Havana. The signal could be heard for most of the 1990s up the East Coast as far north as Maine, but the coded messages were only meant to be decoded by their agents, including a Pentagon analyst named Ana Montes, who lived in this quiet Washington neighborhood. This is where she did all of the business, all the spy business. Exactly. I mean, she would listen to the high-frequency messages upstairs

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday night. She would type up her messages on her computer in her bedroom right up here. This is the area that she lived in, camouflaged, the fact that she was committing espionage right here. He says... Peter Lapp is a retired FBI special agent who was on the team that led the Montez investigation. How'd she do it? She went to work, memorized three things every day, went home and all classified, and then would write them up or type them up. And then every two or three weeks, she would meet in person at lunch, broad daylight, two to three hours over lunch. Maybe I've seen too many movies. When I think spies, I'm thinking Dark of Night, Park Bench, secret cameras, fancy gadgets. That wasn't her. Everyone who works for the intelligence community goes home with classified information in their head. And you can't stop that with guards and technology.

It's just, it's undefeatable. Lapp wrote a book on the FBI investigation into Montez. He told us Havana doesn't pay its spies, so Americans who spy for Cuba don't do it for money, but rather are driven by ideology. Ambassador Rocha was recruited in the late 1970s, influenced, he now says, by the radical politics of the day. Montes was a student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in the 1980s

and was outspoken about her anger toward U.S. policy in Latin America when she was recruited by a Cuban intelligence officer. Montes' father was a U.S. Army doctor, and her siblings worked for the FBI. One of her first jobs out of graduate school was as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. So Ana Montes was already a full-fledged Cuban spy from the moment that she set foot inside the Defense Intelligence Agency. She walked in fully recruited, day one.

Only went to DIA for the purpose of spying for the Cubans. And when you think about the other folks that have been arrested for espionage, most start loyal. They take the oath. They intend to abide by that oath. But then something happens and they flip. And Ana's unique in the sense that she walked in from day one and was an insider

threat and only went for the purpose of spying for the Cubans. How does a Cuban spy walk through the doors of the DIA and get a job? She didn't have to take a polygraph? They did not have a polygraph program at the time. Over the course of her career, she became such an expert that she was known in the intelligence community as the Queen of Cuba. All the while, she was exposing national secrets to Havana. The FBI surveilled her for a year before her arrest as she walked to work and called her Cuban handler. By that time, she had revealed the existence of a top-secret satellite program used by the U.S. to spy on other countries. She also gave Havana the names of 450 American intelligence officials working on Latin American issues, including four undercover officers stationed in Cuba.

And she got away with it for 17 years, until she was arrested in 2001 at her office by FBI Special Agent Peter Lapp and his partner Stephen McCoy. She didn't fit the profile of a typical spy. No, being a woman is incredibly unique, so it doesn't fit that typical what we would look for in a spy, which is mostly men. Montez pleaded guilty to espionage, and in exchange for not spending the rest of her life in prison, she agreed to tell the FBI everything she had done. I wouldn't mind at all meeting two Fridays a month. Through a public records request, we obtained this footage, seen here for the first time, of Montez wearing prison stripes, speaking with FBI investigators. Citing Montez's right to privacy, the FBI denied our request for the recorded audio of their

interviews. But we obtained a declassified transcript of the first day where Montez described how deep in she was. She said, Ever since I started helping the Cubans, there's been no halfway. I don't really know how a person does it without feeling morally bound. It's a full commitment, mentally, physically, emotionally. I feel that what I did was morally right, that I was faithful to principles that were right. Montez told the agents her only regret was that she was forced to cooperate with the FBI as part of her plea deal. It's tearing me up, she said, but if the only way I'm going to see my family again, it's the only way. Agent Lapp sat across from Ana Montes in the interrogation room for seven months.

He said one of the most sobering moments was when she said how far she would have been willing to go for the Cubans in the week after 9-11. She said, if the Cubans asked me to provide them with intelligence about what we were doing in Afghanistan, I absolutely would have done that. And if men and women were killed as a result of my intelligence in Afghanistan, she told us that's the risk that they took. What was the extent of the damage that she did? I do think she's in that tier of some of the most notorious spies in American history. And I think the damage that she did was incredibly significant. After serving 20 years in federal prison, Ana Montes was released in January 2023. She's now living in Puerto Rico,

where she has family and has been celebrated by some as a hero, seen here recently receiving an award from supporters. Through a lawyer, Montes declined our request for an interview. Former Ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha told a judge he was deeply sorry and pleaded guilty to acting as an agent of the Cuban government. At age 73, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison and is currently cooperating with investigators. Just how many state secrets he gave to Cuba, we may never know. Nearly all the details of his spycraft remain classified. Ana Montes has yet to publicly express any remorse.

Do you think there are other Ana Montes' in the government right now? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's chilling. There's no doubt that the Cubans and the Russians and others are still penetrating our government with individuals who are loyal to them and not to us. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast

chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. This year, Apple and Microsoft were joined by a newcomer to the $3 trillion club, computer chip maker NVIDIA. The California-based company saw its stock market value soar from $2 trillion to $3 trillion in just over three months, fueled by the insatiable

demand for its cutting-edge technology, the hardware and software that make today's artificial intelligence possible. As we first reported in April, we wondered how a company founded in 1993 to improve video game graphics turned into a titan of 21st century AI. So we went to Silicon Valley to meet NVIDIA's 61-year-old co-founder and CEO, Jensen Wong, who has no doubt AI is about to change everything. At NVIDIA's annual developers conference this past March, the mood wasn't just upbeat. It was downright giddy. More than 11,000 enthusiasts, software developers, tech moguls, and happy shareholders filed into San Jose's pro hockey arena to kick off a four-day AI extravaganza.

They came to see this man, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA. Welcome to GTC! What was that like for you to walk out on that stage and see that? You know, Bill, I'm an engineer, not a performer. When I walked out there and all of the people going crazy, it took the breath out of me. And so I was the scariest I've ever been. I'm still scared. You'd never know it. Clad in his signature cool black outfit, Jensen shared the stage with NVIDIA-powered robots

and shared his vision of an AI future. A new industrial revolution. It reminded us of the transformational moment when Apple's Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Jensen Huang unveiled NVIDIA's latest graphics processing unit, or GPU. This is Blackwell. Designed in America but made in Taiwan like most advanced semiconductors, Blackwell, he says, is the fastest chip ever. Google is gearing up for Blackwell. The whole industry is gearing up for Blackwell.

NVIDIA ushered in the AI revolution with its game-changing GPU, a single chip able to process a myriad of calculations all at once, not sequentially like more standard chips. The GPU is the engine of NVIDIA's AI computer, enabling it to rapidly absorb a firehose of information. It does quadrillions of calculations a second.

It's just insane numbers. Is it doing things now that surprise you? We're hoping that it does things that surprise us. That's the whole point. In some areas like drug discovery, designing better materials that are lighter, stronger. We need artificial intelligence to help us explore the universe in places that we could have never done ourselves. Let me show you. Here, Bill, look at this. Jensen took us around

the GTC convention hall to show us what AI has made possible in just the past few years. I'm making your drink now. Some creations were dazzling. This is a digital twin of the earth. Once it learns how to calculate weather, it can calculate and predict weather 3,000 times faster than a supercomputer and a thousand times less energy. But NVIDIA's AI revolution extends far beyond this hall. Blue metallic spaceship. And let's generate something. Pinar Seyhan Demirda is originally from Istanbul, but co-founded Qubrick near Boston. Her AI application uses NVIDIA's GPUs to instantly turn a simple text prompt into a virtual movie set for a fraction of the cost of today's backdrops. This isn't something that's already planned.

No, we're doing it in real time. It's live. Is Hollywood knocking at your door? And we're getting a lot of love. Nearby at Generate Biomedicines, Dr. Alex Snyder, head of research and development, is using NVIDIA's technology to create protein-based drugs. She was surprised at first to see they showed promise in the lab. Initially, when I was told about the application of AI to drug development, I sort of rolled my eyes and said, yeah, you know, show me the data.

And then I looked at the data, and it was very compelling. Dr. Snyder's team asks its AI models to create new proteins to fight diseases like cancer and asthma. A new way to defeat the coronavirus demonstrated potential in a clinical trial. You're now working with proteins that do not exist in nature, that you're coming up with by way of AI? Yes. We are actually generating what we call de novo, completely new structures that have not existed before. Do you trust it? As scientists, we can't trust. We have to test.

We're not putting Frankenstein's into people. We're taking what's known, and we're really pushing the field. We're pushing the biology to make drugs that look like regular drugs but function even better. This is a technology that will only get better from here. Brett Adcock is CEO of Figure, a Silicon Valley startup with funding from NVIDIA.

Look at his answer to labor shortages, an NVIDIA GPU-driven prototype called Figure One. I think what's been really extraordinary is the pace of progress we've made in 21 months. a NVIDIA GPU-driven prototype called Figure One. I think what's been really extraordinary is the pace of progress we've made in 21 months. From zero to this in 21 months. Zero to this, yeah. We were walking this robot in under a year

since I incorporated the company. Could you do this without NVIDIA's technology? We think they're arguably the best in the world at this. I don't know if this would be possible without them. I'm here to assist with tasks as requested. We were amazed that Figure 1 is not just walking, but seemed to reason. Hand me something healthy. On it. Figure 1 was able to understand I wanted the orange, not the packaged snack.

Thank you. It's not yet perfected. You're going to get it. But the early results are so promising, German automaker BMW started testing the robot in its South Carolina factory this year. I think there's an opportunity to ship billions of robots in the coming decades onto the planet.

Billions. I would think that a lot of workers would look at that as, this robot is taking my job. I think over time, AI and robotics will start doing more and more of what humans can, and better. But what about the worker? The workers work for companies. And so companies, when they become more productive, earnings increase.

I've never seen one company that had earnings increase and not hire more people. There are some jobs that are going to become obsolete. Well, let me offer it this way. I believe that you still want human in the loop because we have good judgment, because there are circumstances that the machines are just not going to understand. The futuristic NVIDIA campus sits just down the road from its modest birthplace, this Denny's in San Jose. Good morning. Where 31 years ago, NVIDIA was just an idea. My goodness. When he was 15, Jensen Huang worked as a dishwasher at Denny's. As a 30-year-old

electrical engineer married with two children, he and two friends, NVIDIA co-founders Chris Malachowski and Curtis Preem, envisioned a whole new way of processing video game graphics. So we came here, right here to this denny's, sat right back there, and the three of us decided to start the company. Frankly, I had no idea how to do it. And nor did they. None of us knew how to do anything.

Their big idea? Accelerate the processing power of computers with a new graphics chip. Their initial attempt flopped and nearly bankrupted the company in 1996. And the genius of the engineers and Chris and Curtis, we pivoted to the right way of doing things. And created their groundbreaking GPU. The chip took video games from this to this today. Completely changed computer graphics, saved the company, launched us into the stratosphere.

Just eight years after Denny's, NVIDIA earned a spot in the S&P 500. Jensen then set his sights on developing the software and hardware for a revolutionary GPU-driven supercomputer, which would take the company far beyond video games. To Wall Street, it was a risky bet. To early developers of AI, it was a revelation. Was that luck or was that vision? That was luck founded by vision. We invented this capability, and then one day,

the researchers that were creating deep learning discovered this architecture, because this architecture turns out to have been perfect for them. Perfect for AI. Perfect for AI. This is the first one we've ever shipped. In 2016, Jensen delivered NVIDIA's AI supercomputer, the first of its kind, to Elon Musk, then a board member of OpenAI, which used it to create the building blocks of ChatGPT.

How are you? When AI took off, so did Jensen Huang's reputation. Can we get a picture? Yeah, yeah. He's now a Silicon Valley celebrity. He told us the boy and the Dishwasher busboy could grow up to be this. There's no magic. It's just 61 years of hard work every single day. I don't think there's anything more than that. We met a humble Jensen at Denny's. Back at NVIDIA's headquarters in Santa Clara, we saw he can be intense. Let me tell you what some of the people who you work with said about you. Demanding. Perfectionist. Not easy to work for.

All that sound right? Perfectly, yeah. It should be like that. If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn't be easy. All right, guys, keep up the good work. NVIDIA has never done better. Investors are bullish. But last year, more than 600 top AI scientists, ethicists, and others signed this statement urging caution, warning of AI's risk to humanity. When I talk to you and I hear you speak, part of me goes, gee whiz. And the other part of me goes, oh my God, what are we in for yeah yeah which one is it it's both

it's both yeah you're feeling all the right feelings i feel both you feel sure sure humanity will have the choice to see themselves inferior to machines or superior to machines. Pinar Sehan Demirda is an AI optimist, though she named her company Kubrick, an homage to Stanley Kubrick, the director of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Hello, Hal, do you read me? In that film, Hal, the AI computer, goes rogue. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. I think that's what worries people about AI, that we will lose control of it. Just because a machine can do faster calculations, comparisons, and analytical solution creation, that doesn't make you smarter than you. It simply computates faster. In my world, in my belief, smarts have to do with your capacity to love, create, expand, transcend. These are qualities that no machine can ever bear, that are reserved to only humans. There is something going on. Jensen Huang sees an AI future of

progress and prosperity, not one with machines as our masters. We can only hope he's right. Thank you all for coming. Thank you. 2023 was the year the world learned to pronounce Killian. The ancient Irish name seemed to be on everyone's lips as the film Oppenheimer became a blockbuster, winning seven Oscars, including Best Actor for Cillian Murphy. Murphy has worked nonstop for nearly 30 years, but it was the epic drama of the atomic bomb that ignited a star. As we told you last winter, Murphy seems to be more famous than well-known, so we set out to learn more. We were warned the 48-year-old Irishman is reserved and wouldn't talk about himself, but we discovered finding Cillian Murphy depends on where you look. Ireland's Dingle Peninsula was named for a goddess before such things were written,

and for 6,000 years, stories have passed by ear. So if verse inhabits every Irish soul, then in a country pub, Cillian Murphy is among peers, as he would have it, just a man with a pint to lift and no fame to bear. What is the meaning of Ireland to you? I don't think I can answer that question satisfactorily. It's defined who I am as a person and my values. It's just home.

Home includes his wife of 20 years, two teenage sons, and Scout, a lab named for the character in To Kill a Mockingbird. That figures. Murphy has always let stories lead his path. You find so much empathy in novels, you know, because there you are putting yourself into somebody else's point of view. I've always been a big reader. When a movie can connect with someone and they feel seen or feel heard, or a novel can change somebody's life, or a piece of music, an album can change someone's life. And I've had all that happen to me.

And that's the power of good art, I think. There's a straight line from the music in the pub to Oppenheimer. I think they're from the same source. I mean, I really do. I don't see... I see it's all in a continuum. You know what I mean? It's just a form of expression. Expression in the eyes of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who created the atom bomb but never controlled it. If they detonated too high in the air the blast

won't be as powerful with respect dr. Oppenheimer we'll take it from here I remember reading at the beginning about him that he was more riddled and answer and I thought oh okay wow that's that's interesting I'm curious about your notes. The riddle was in this script by writer-director Christopher Nolan, printed in red so it couldn't be photocopied. I did genuinely think it's one of the greatest screenplays I'd ever read. And you told him, I'll do it. I mean, I said I'd do it before I read it.

That's quite a risk. Why would you do that? It's always paid off for me, you know, in every film that I've worked with him on. I'm not going back. I'm not going back. There have been six Chris Nolan films for Murphy, Dunkirk, Inception, and three Batman titles. Would you like to see my mask? You told me that getting a film made and getting it seen is a miracle. It is. And then if it's any way good, that's a miracle. And then if it connects with audiences, that's a miracle. So it's a miracle upon miracle upon miracle to have a film like Oppenheimer. It really is. His Oppenheimer was not so much a miracle as hard work. He lost 28 pounds to get the silhouette.

Then he rose to the character step by step over six months, reading, listening to Oppenheimer's lectures, and covering miles on the beach, performing for Scout. I remember at one point I said to Chris, Chris, there appears to be, he appears to speak Dutch here, and I think he's giving a lecture in Dutch here. What are we going to do about that? And Chris said, you mean, what are you going to do about that? Wait, what's he saying?

Murphy says he put all he learned in the back of his mind and acted on instinct. I think instinct is your most powerful tool that you have as an actor. Nothing must be predetermined, so therefore you mustn't have a plan about how you're going to play stuff. And I love that. It's like being buffeted by the wind and being buffeted by emotion. You don't get to commit the sin and then have us all feel sorry for you. Emily Blunt plays Oppenheimer's tormented wife.

You pulled yourself together. He's very visceral to be in a scene with. It's like he transports you. He'llceral to be in a scene with it. It's like you, he transports you. He'll kidnap you in a scene. My favorite acting moment of his in Oppenheimer is the scene after the bomb has been dropped and he's addressing all of the people at Los Alamos. The world will remember this day. He somehow welds together the concept of being proud of what they did and regretting it very deeply all at the same time. I know.

It's too soon to determine what the results of the bombing are. But I'll bet the Japanese didn't like it. No one moment is about one thing. And if you're as agile as someone like Killian and as vulnerable and as clever, you can play it all. But I don't know if many people can do what he does. Killian Murphy discovered agility in his hometown, Cork. His mother was a teacher, his father a school inspector. In high school, Murphy and his brother had a band. Performing led to acting class and his first play. This is more like the size of a storage room than a theater. Yeah, but that's all we were used to.

His first theater, 1996, age 20. The play was Disco Pigs, which grew to bigger theaters and became a movie. Why did you think you could be an actor? I didn't. I was very comfortable on stage in front of an audience from when I was little. I never had any nerves doing that. I felt natural, you know, and thrilling.

In this theater, what did you learn about acting? There's a fire escape door right there, and that's kind of an alleyway there, and so you get a lot of drunk guys out of their minds bashing up against the fire escape door, and it used to kind of energize us. So I remember learning about taking whatever you have, sort of responding to whatever the energy is in the room and using it. That's really good training. Yeah.

Maintaining your character with the drunk guy yelling through the fire escape door. Yeah, yeah. And I think theater is such an absurd undertaking when you think of it, because at any point it could collapse and go wrong. It's dangerous. Yeah, and I love that aspect of it, yeah. That love led him to drop law school, and since then there have been a dozen plays and 40 movies.

I love it when it becomes an immersive experience. I love getting lost in it. In the early days, that was, with theater, it felt kind of extraordinary that with just the power of will and a couple of lights and a good script, we were creating this world. So that's kind of addictive when it works well.

It worked well in 2013 in a breakout role as a leading man. In the series Peaky Blinders, Murphy plays Thomas Shelby, who survives World War I to lead a family of gangsters. You're mostly in the war, so you know the battle plans always change

and get f***ed up. Well, here it is. They're all damaged, broken men, but something got knocked in him and he came back with this incredible drive and ambition and like, I'm not afraid of death, so now I can do whatever I want. In Tommy Shelby, you created a sympathetic, relatable monster.

Kill and kill. sympathetic, relatable monster. Care. Care. Tell the way to my people, listen. I like to be challenged, and when I read something, I want to go, I don't really know how I can do that. In ten years of Peaky Blinders, Murphy came into his own.

I heard very early on in my career a director, it was one of the Sidneys, it could have been Sidney Pollock, but one of them said, it takes 30 years to make an actor. It's not just technique and experience and all that, it's maturing as a human being and trying to grapple with life and figure it out and all of that stuff. So by the time you've been doing it for 30 years, you've all of that banked, hopefully. And eventually then, I think you'll get to a point where you might be an okay actor. Maturing is the theme of Murphy's new film based on the novel Small Things Like These. He plays Bill Furlong, tormented by the injustice he sees.

His wife fears that his empathy will upend their lives. Don't you ever question it. If you want to get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore. That's Eileen Walsh. No actor has known Murphy longer. She was his first partner in Disco Pigs 28 years ago. Is his work ethic rooted in fear or joy? Oh, that's a good question. I think it can only be joy, but it sometimes takes a lot of pain to get to that joy. The deeper we go with acting, the cost is greater for us. And physically, I know Oppenheimer has cost him for the weight loss he insisted, and it was his choice to do but and it was the right choice to

create that amazing silhouette but from the very beginning our warm-ups for disco pigs involved us punching each other quite hard and like going for it and then bursting out into it. This huge ball of velocity coming into it was the beginning of an Oppenheimer, was the whole kind of atom of us. Now, after three decades of work, Cillian Murphy is cast in the most familiar Irish legend of all, with a 24-carat gold-plated statue at the end of his long spectrum of talent.

You have screwed this up, though, you know. In what way? You used to be an actor, and now you're a movie star. Okay. Am I? I think you could be both. You know, I've never understood that term really, movie star. I've always just felt like I'm an actor. That's, I think, a term for other people rather than for me. Now, the last minute of 60 Minutes. When Jimmy Carter died at home in Plains, Georgia,

the 100-year-old former president was under hospice care, leaving life on his own terms. President Carter lost his bid for re-election in 1980, his successes eclipsed at the polls by a stagnant economy and the Iran hostage affair. For the next 43 years, Jimmy Carter lived a life of service and example. He wielded saws and hammers building homes for the needy. He traveled the world monitoring elections and wrote more than 30 books on Middle

East peace, his Christian faith, and fly fishing. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.