There’s a lot going on in the first trailer for Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s highly-anticipated 28 Years Later. First, the newly-released clip opens with the creepiest use of the Teletubbies since, well, the original Teletubbies. The trailer then kindly does the math for us as “days became weeks [and] weeks became years” from the original outbreak of the Rage Virus—10,228 days (or 28 years) to be exact.
Then there’s that eerie poem—a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots” from 1903—that serves as the only dialogue in the back half of the trailer as we watch a small, regressed society face down an oncoming horde. This group—which contains characters played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, and Ralph Fiennes, has reverted back to primitive methods of both culture and protection. (Taylor-Johnson gets a couple good Katniss Everdeen moments with his bow and arrow here.) These tactics likely kept them off the grid for the bulk of those 10,228 days, but don’t really seem to be up to the task of wiping out the genuinely terrifying band of zombies.
All of which brings us to the one moment that makes all of the others seem almost irrelevant. Right at the 1:48 mark, was that… a zombified version of Academy Award-winner Cillian Murphy? It sure looks like him—well what he may look like if you removed all the fat, muscle, and organs from his body at least. We know that Murphy, who also starred in the original film, is set to return in a “surprising way,” per one Sony exec. Well, this would certainly be surprising!
Unfortunately, we may have to wait until the film premieres on June 20, 2025 to find out for sure. At least that’s a bit shorter than 28 years.