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Cillian Murphy vs Broken Social Scene Bonus Quotes

Starting on page 56 of Under the Radar’s Spring 2007 issue you can read an in-depth five-page conversation between Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew and actor Cillian Murphy. Unfortunately, space did not allow us to print the entire conversation in the issue. Below find all the parts of the interview that we couldn’t fit in the issue.

Kevin Drew: That’s probably one of the beautiful things about the Irish mob is that they will put [money] towards making a great beautiful, lovely art film like Breakfast On Pluto.

Cillian Murphy: [Laughs] The Irish mob. There are actually beginning to be private investors in Ireland who are seeing that you can put some money into movies like this. It gives you a bit of cachet and you might be lucky and get something back.

Kevin: Exactly, the parties are good.

Kevin: Was [The Wind That Shakes the Barley] an all Irish film set kind of thing?

Cillian: Yeah, what [Ken Loach] does, if you look at any of his films, he just casts from the area he’s shooting in, so all the actors have it in their DNA and they’re not putting on an accent. I mean this is the second film only I've ever done in my own accent. And everyone in the movie is from Cork.

Kevin: Was that shot in Cork?

Cillian: Yeah. All around the locale.

Kevin: I spoke to someone and they thought [The Wind That Shakes the Barley] was very violent. I did not find it violent at all, in terms of what the fuck is out there. And I think that’s a very obvious thing to say. But I actually found it, there was something very calm about it, the way that it was shot, right down to just the soundtrack itself. I thought it delivered everything very beautifully. So, I think you and the cast, and especially the director, you all did a very wonderful job and I hope people see it. And I don't know, I saw it, I had the flu. It just makes it more sensitive and real when you completely can’t get off the couch.

Cillian: Yeah, well I think Americans, and I know you're not American, but…

Kevin: That’s okay, I am. [Laughs]

Cillian: [Laughs] But that again when you mention the IRA or anything like that, they just think of the Provisional IRA and what happened in the North of Ireland. But I think this film will hopefully—it’s not meant to be an education, because you can’t take your history lessons from movies, but—it should at least open people’s eyes a little bit more to what actually happened and why the country was in the state it was in for many, many years.

Cillian: And can you just talk a little bit about you guys doing soundtracks and stuff? Because I know you did the Half Nelson sound track, is that right?

Kevin: Yeah, they came to us. We got a call that some film was using 15 of our already recorded songs and it was one of those things where you were like, “No way!” And then we saw the film and there was absolutely no way we could not do it, we just loved the movie so much. And the way they used the music.

Cillian: And it did so well, huh?

Kevin: Yeah.

Cillian: I haven’t seen it yet. I haven’t got a chance to see it.

Kevin: Yeah, you should, it’s very good. And the guy is really good.

Cillian: Ryan Gosling is a great actor.

Kevin: And he just got that [Oscar] nomination. And it was really well done. They were such sweet people, Ryan [Fleck] and Anna [Boden] who produced it, directed it and wrote it. It’s a film made by humans about humans and that’s what we’re kind of into doing soundtracks to. That’s why we ended up doing Snow Cake and how we met [producer] Gina [Carter]. It’s just that there are so many of them, the name is becoming a bit of an institution or a brand. I mean there’s a soundtrack that was just done that I had nothing to do with and it went under Broken Social Scene because Brendan did it. With Charles in it. But people come up to me and they’re like, “Hey, I heard you're doing that [soundtrack].”

Cillian: Is it a fluid number of members in the group or how many does it officially stand at then?

Kevin: Well it’s always been a fluid number of members….I don't know what the fuck is going on. All I know is that yeah, we’re friends, Cillian. It was all friendship and that’s how it started and then now we’re just kind of regrouping.

Mark Redfern (Under the Radar): Are there any fictional characters that you're dying to play? Either from literary sources or from comic books or old TV shows or anything like that? Is there anything that sticks out?

Cillian: I wish I had an original thought there. They all seem to be already bought or made or Leonardo DiCaprio’s doing them. These big studios just have people in their literary department and in publishing houses and all the comic books are all bought up. It’s very hard to find an original idea that hasn’t been bought. But I keep looking.

Mark: Cillian, you’d done movies before [28 Days Later], but that was really the one that kind of launched you.

Cillian: That was the first one that anyone saw, really. And it was the first one with an established director. So that film means a lot to me because, well, I’m very proud of it and also it opened a lot of doors and people began to be able to pronounce my fuckin’ name, you know.

Mark: Right. Is there an actor that you kind of look up to, in terms of how their career path goes?

Cillian: There are a lot of them. But I stopped naming them, because it gets a bit embarrassing. And then you end up meeting them and you feel like a bit of an idiot. And there’s so many, it’s the obvious ones I think, both living and dead. But it’s funny, I get way more excited or nervous or flustered when I meet musicians, weirdly.

Mark: You seem to have this interesting career where you're doing these Hollywood movies and then the independent movies. Are you going to try and keep doing that? Or do you see a time when you're going to get swallowed up by Hollywood?

Cillian: I hope not. I mean for me it’s just about the stories that are worth telling and it doesn’t matter if they're within the Hollywood system or outside of it, because there’s good and bad movies made in both systems.

Cillian: Now what’s [your solo album] going to be called?

Kevin: I’m not sure. And I’ve already gone through this, Cillian, where you go, “I think it’s gonna be called this.” And then they start printing that. And then you change it.

Mark: Yeah, I remember we did an interview with you where you named the third Social Scene album as Windsurfing Nation.

Kevin: And it should have remained that.

Mark: We printed that and everybody was referring to it as that for a year, because it was a year before it came out. And then, of course, you changed it to a self-titled album.

Cillian: There’s a song [on the album] called “Windsurfing Nation.”

Kevin: I’ll never be there again. And I don't know about you, Cillian, but it was one of those points where just everything got too serious with this record. It was just kind of ridiculous and we changed our minds about things so many fucking times.

Cillian: Well it’s a fucking great record, man.

Kevin: Yeah, so whatever. In the end, I love it. But yes, Mark, we should have kept that title. I told you what the title was then, and still think it works now. And people still refer to it as Windsurfing Nation.

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Dazed and Confused - In At The Deep End - (TEXT VERSION)

After topping the charts, Feist has jumped into the unknown by making her film debut opposite Britain’s most versatile actor, Cillian Murphy. Here the pair re-unite to talk stage fright and rock dreams.

The runaway success of Feist’s last album The Reminder not only won the singer-songwriter numerous awards but allowed her to expand her artistry in unusual ways, from showcasing her love for shadow play and puppetry in her live show to appearing on Sesame Street singing a custom-tailored version of her smash hit, “1,2,3,4”. Now she’s taken her love of performance one step further, making her acting debut in The Water, a short film inspired by her song of the same name. Directed by Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew over two days in the wintry climes of Canada, The Water is a haunting, almost wordless elegy to lost love.

Her co-star in this icy heartbreaker is Mr. Cillian Murphy. Since appearing on the cover of Dazed back in 2006, the 32-year-old has continued to establish himself as one of Britain’s most versatile actors, playing roles as varied as Batman’s nemesis in Batman Begins and the romantic lead in period-piece Edge of Love, to appearing as both husband and wife in the upcoming psychological drama, Peacock.

After Feist came to the end of her mammoth world tour, Dazed reunited her with Cillian, on a break from shooting new film, Perrier’s Bounty, to talk about The Water and their other shared artistic endeavors, from failed rock star dreams to their apprehension about acting. They were so excited to see each other again, they broke out a pair of matching woolly jumpers and went for a bracing stroll in Regents Park…

Cillian Murphy: I’m obsessed with music. I’ve been a fan of Broken Social Scene for years – I went to see them play an amazing gig at the Scale about two years ago. I briefly met Kevin (Drew) backstage afterwards.

Feist: Kevin actually got the idea for the film after meeting you! It was something in your eyes that sparked the whole storyline. He didn’t tell you that because he didn’t want to freak you out! He came up to me and said, “I have this idea for a story, and I want you to be in it. I think I could probably ask this guy to do it.” The fact that it was for The Water came later. He wanted to make a film and it turned out that he thought my song would suit it. My involvement came from that.

Cillian: But I never had a script for this ever. It’s very unusual for me to not have a script for a project. Kevin talked to me on the phone and emailed me all the time but there was never anything on paper, which was fucking crazy! I knew the outline and that was it. The concept and the song appealed to me immensely. And the fact that it was independent. Back in the 60s people collaborated together purely out of mutual respect, not for any commercial response, just purely to make something. That really appealed to me. There were no agents or publicists – it was just a few of us in the fucking woods making this thing.

Feist: I watched Wind That Shakes the Barley and Breakfast on Pluto the day before you arrived on set. Those are good places to start. It wasn’t until a month ago that I watched Dark Knight. I was on a flight and I screamed so loud!

Cillian: Really?

Feist: (laughs) Yeah! You were so scary! Before this, I had only been in high school plays. I was in one community theatre play when I was 17. The first time I was ever written up in the paper it said, ‘This play is terrible, this is really the worst play Calgary has ever seen. The only redeeming factor might be Leslie Feist, who, to her credit, doesn’t even seem to be trying to act, she’s just being an annoying 17-year-old.’ I remember reading it and I was like, 'They’re right! I don’t know what I’m doing!’

Cillian: I remember saying acting would be easy for you. I firmly believe that there’s a performance gene. Whether that comes out through singing or playing live or what you do in your music video, it’s a variation or suspended version of acting. So, if you can do that, you can absolutely go act in front of the camera and you do it beautifully.

Feist: You know, I never put myself in the position of trying to be something other than a variation on my own theme. I took your lead a lot. There were scenes with you and David Fox (their co-star in The Water) and I just hovered behind the camera watching it go down. You were doing so much with so little. Onstage, I just translate things to the back of the room. You unconsciously exaggerate everything.

Cillian: I’m a fucking frustrated rock star. I’ve played in bands since I was 20. But it’s pretty much a hobby because this is what I do. I’m less comfortable with actors making records than musicians acting. I’m a bit snobbier about it because you already have a platform as an actor. You find a lot of actors are frustrated rock stars.

Feist: It’s the cliche of the crossover – like, if you put out a record, it wouldn’t be that out there, it wouldn’t surprise me. There’s something that happens where there’s an instinct to be curious. You see bands, and their posturing is often more potent than what they started doing. All of that stuff is a variation on performing, or finding pieces of yourself to deliver. Over the years, I kind of went through all that, being in rock bands. You’re thinking about yourself from the outside which is an aspect of acting. What do you think makes musicians want to start acting?

Cillian: I guess it’s so hard to make your living as a musician and I wasn’t really good, so that was an important realisation I think. You have to find some way of self-expression so, for me, that was acting. The other guys still play and they’re really good, but I’m really glad it didn’t happen. So often what happens is that you’ve signed, release a record and you’re dropped. You get a lot of people who are eaten up by the system and spat out by it.

Feist: Bizarrely, record deals are usually the things that break-up the initial kernel of joy. Record deals can actually be the kiss of death. Thank God I didn’t get one until I was 28. I’d already made five albums before someone decided to put my record out! I may have only sold 20 of them, but I’m really glad I had gone through that. I barely understood how to weather being signed but luckily I had ten years under my belt already. If you get a deal at 18, you’re just a [something] little person. You often talk about going into [something]. I’m fascinated by the courage it takes to act live on stage. You’re naked. I sling a guitar in front of me so I don’t have to do that.

Cillian: I started off in theatre. I keep going back to it and I intend on going back to it next year as well. It’s the live element that makes it attractive and terrifying.

Feist: I guess it’s the terror that is attractive!

Cillian: You can’t recreate that connection you have with the audience. Making a movie is so piecemeal, and creating emotion in that environment is mechanical. Whereas, with theatre, it’s like a visceral reaction.

Feist: But I was really uncomfortable in my skin trying to understand how to be that way. What was hard for me was not talking. I felt kind of mute without any words to imbue the moment with intention. But with you guys, you were saying so much without saying anything. Just the ability to connect your emotions and relate to each other, I found it so fascinating. I don’t know if I’d act again. I’ve been asked a lot and I’ve said no every time. I usually say no because it relies too much on that character, whatever script I’ve been given. I’m looking for the Jack White in Cold Mountain angle. I feel I could do it if it’s really in another era, another place and time…

Cillian: You did the acting without any dialogue. That’s the fucking hardest. You were thrown in the deep end. I’m telling you, try something with words!

Feist: Then you’ve got something to hinge it on. It was interesting. There were parts of my mind I don’t think I ever checked out before. The day after we shot the movie, I swore I’d never do that again. It wasn’t fun, I was scared I was doing it wrong. I feel ridiculous, though, sitting next to you talking about acting. For me, it’s evident there’s a craft there and it takes time and instinct. It’s silly to say I’m gonna do that now. First of all, I have no ambition for it. Second of all, I really respect the matter. It’s something that’s in your blood.

Cillian: We should work together again. I like to re-collaborate. I’ve worked with Danny Boyle twice and John Crowley, working on stage and film. I think it’s nice. You establish a shorthand, a quicker route to the end-product because there’s a trust there. It’s harder as an actor, because you’re interpreting work, rather than creating work as a musician. But as you get older, you feel the need to make stuff happen for yourself, rather than wait for someone to offer you a job. So I’m starting to produce a few bits. This piece is the perfect example of what I think people who respect each other’s work can achieve by working together. I’m really proud of this film, it turned out for the best.

Kevin Drew

The centre of the musical maelstrom known as Broken Social Scene talks about directing his debut short film.

Kevin Drew has taken a break from being musical lynchpin of the ever-expanding arts collective, Broken Social Scene to make a directorial debut with The Water. Drew initially started off in acting school before segueing into creating offbeat musical brilliance with the band and his own label, Arts and Craft. Having directed videos for Broken Social Scene, making the film was a logical progression and a real labour of love for him.

Dazed & Confused: Did you have an image in mind when you devised The Water?

Kevin Drew: It was generally the faces of these characters. I knew what the landscape was – that there was to be a pond and that it had to be frozen. But generally, I wanted the story to be told in the eyes of each of the characters. There’s only eight words, so it was all down to the eyes of the actors.

How is the songwriting and filmmaking process linked?

Stories come to me on a daily basis. I don’t know exactly where this came from but I do know it was in the middle of winter and I do know I was listening to “The Water”. I felt like the film had to represent the actual recording of the song because on that song, you can hear things like people breathing and their chair creaking. The lyrics are not where the film is coming from, but more the feel of the song. Leslie loves Aesop’s Fables. I knew she was into fairytale stories so I thought, “What happens if we turn this into a fable?” I really wanted it to be like a poem.

How did you convince Feist to act in it?

First of all, she loves a challenge. She was into it from the beginning. Especially when Cillian became involved. When the three of them got together, it was chilling for me, I loved it. The funny thing was that we tried out having a relationship together and it didn’t work. It actually ended a few months before the film. We sort of made a pact with each other to still do the movie. I was thinking the other day, so many people are afraid, it’s so hard to do relationships sometimes because they don’t want a photograph of what their personal failure is. The other day when I watched the film finally, I thought, “Well we didn’t take any personal photographs but we made a beautiful little film together.”

What did you learn from working with actors like Cillian and David Fox?

Well I loved working with Cillian because he hadn’t done anything like this in a long time, so everything was refreshing to him. His enthusiasm was amazing, he is being part of the project. For me, David is so beautiful to look at, in forms of seeing the conflicts within him.

Is this a conscious stepping-stone to directing a feature?

Yeah, I’ve cornered some producers, made them shake my hand on some funding and I’m currently writing like three scripts. I get so excited about life sometimes that my brain keeps hopping around. I’ve had a crazy four years, just like a kid in a candy store. As I get older, I want to tell stories. But I love Broken Social Scene so much, it’s such a free thing for us. We haven’t been locked into anything. I look forward to creating more things for people to work on and work with. Basically I’m just trying to get everyone involved and start another empire.

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IFC, 2009

Cillian Murphy talks about "The Water"

Cillian Murphy is interviewed about his new short film "The Water" co-starring Feist and directed by Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene.

Cillian Murphy is the kind of guy who can call himself Kitten, put on a dress, make you believe he's a girl, then make you forget everything else. His repertoire's impressive and he is, like his characters, unquestionably memorable. Maybe it's the eyes, maybe it's the voice, but even his sinister roles are strangely comforting -- something very genuine always comes through Mr. Murphy, a welcome exception in an era of green screens and Ponzi schemes.

His latest role is an unusual one, in a semi-experimental short film called "The Water," inspired by the Feist song of the same name. It was directed by Kevin Drew, best known for his band/collective Broken Social Scene (of which Feist is also a member). "The Water"'s a beautiful, nearly wordless piece that weaves a fixation on a wintry landscape with Feist's song and a sad sort of fairytale. I called Murphy in Ireland to talk about the film and learned his family was mourning the loss of a loved one. Still, he set aside time to talk about the project, about conveying emotion through silence, and the ineffable mysteries of the human mind.

I read that you're tight with Kevin Drew and Leslie Feist -- is that how you became involved in the film, or were you approached before, and the friendship grew out of it?

Basically, I've been a fan of both Broken Social Scene and Feist's music for a number of years now. I went to see Broken Social Scene play in London three years ago, maybe a bit longer, and met Kevin afterwards, briefly, and we kind of got on. A year or so later, he interviewed me for Under The Radar magazine, and we just stayed on the line after the interview. He said "Listen, I'd love to send you this thing I've been thinking about." It was just before [Feist's solo album] "The Reminder" had come out, I still hadn't heard the record, and when I did, I thought it was just incredible. He told me about that song and said he had this idea. With the producer, Jannie [McInnes], they managed to pull the whole thing together very quickly, and all of the sudden it was "We're gonna do it, can you come to Toronto in two weeks?" And I was like, sure, let's do it. We shot it in like two days. There was never a script [laughs]. It just came about and I'm really proud of it.

Your character is interesting, clearly troubled by the goings on, stepping out for smokes, reluctant, anxious. Tell me about him.

I don't really want to talk too much about it because I think it's nicer when people take what they want from the piece. Without sounding too artsy fartsy, it's a musical poem and you can take from it what you want, so I'm loathe to kind of give away my interpretation of it. But I think he's very close to his dad, and his dad has had this loss in his life and so he's trying to facilitate his dad reconciling himself to that loss, and unusual things happen! The way Kevin spoke about it -- everything is very musical, the way he talks about it -- and it was all about emotion. And I love that. It wasn't at all intellectual, it was just about feelings.

Yeah, the union of the music with the film is interesting to me...so you were highly aware of the song, stepping into the mood of the performance?

What appealed to me most about it when he told me about the idea [was that he said] this is going to be for all intents and purposes a silent movie. I think there are like four words of dialogue in the film, and I love that, the fact that you've got to act or convey emotion, just silently. It's the hardest test of any actor, I think. Obviously, music then combined with that -- that's why music works so effectively in film when it's done right. It can really just magnify emotions, and people feel or can identify more clearly [with] what's happening with the characters. 

Speaking of this and given the title, "The Water," it's interesting you actually see no water in the piece.

[laughs] No, it's all frozen.

It's often called ice. [laughter] What's your take on the notion that water is often used to represent life, and ice its absence?

There are lots of things you can draw from it, because life [has been] suspended, shall we say, in my mother's character [played by Feist]. When stuff is frozen, it's suspended and frozen in time and all that. But again, I think people can take from it what they will, they may take nothing or they may take innumerable things. You've got to be very careful with something like this because it's so delicate really.

It really plays out like an odd dream about loss. I think I’ve had a sad, mystical dream, not unlike this after losing someone before.

Yeah, that’s a lovely way of describing it really, and I think Kevin and Leslie would be very happy with that. And also then you have the lyrics of the song, which are something completely separate as well. They’re beautiful. The mountain, and the water, and the comparison between, it’s really poetic. You put that layer on top of the music and the environment that they’re in, it’s great. And I like the way it takes time. The first time I saw it, even though the film is something like 12 minutes long, nothing really happens for like the first four. And I really like that in film. You just have to sit, and observe, and just wait for things to unfold.

Yeah, there’s a sort of magical evolution that takes place. Do you believe in magic yourself?

[laughs] Do I believe in magic? Ah, I don’t know. That’s kind of a broad question. I guess not in the kind of “pick a card, any card” type of magic. But I believe the mind is a powerful entity and I think that when the mind is affected in such a way through loss, or through love, or through fear, that something close to magic can occur.

I agree. It seems like even with this role, whether you’re playing a masked sociopath or a lovable transsexual, you have an innate calm about you, even in the diversity of the roles you play.

I’ve always been attracted to, and I’ve said this many times, people under pressure, and people in situations of pressure. And they may be normal people or they may be extraordinary people, but it’s an interesting study of what happens to a person in that situation. Or it’s interesting trying to portray that. In regards to the calm thing, I don’t know. [laughs] I’d say that people close to me wouldn’t use that to describe me.

You don’t think you’re bringing yourself into these roles?

I don’t know. I don’t want to go to far into it because you don’t want to talk it away, but you’re always bringing elements of yourself. You can’t but help do that. I think when you express yourself through music or acting, you always bring parts of yourself to greater or lesser degrees with each role, but I don’t know about the calm thing. I’ve never really dwelt or thought about [that] much really. But I’m secretly taking it as a compliment.

Good, it’s meant to be! Do you have anything on the horizon with Kevin or Feist?

We’re going to keep in touch, and I know Kevin has a couple of movie ideas. I think those guys are making a record in the meantime, but I think he’s got lots of movie ideas and he was an unbelievably natural director. I know he’d done a couple of Broken Social Scene videos, but this was something different, this is a little short film and he just got it. And from talking to him and Leslie, it’s like he’s been making and writing films in his head for years. I was so amazed by his ability to understand the way it all works. It took me a long time to grasp the nature or the language of film and he seemed to have it just naturally and that’s a real gift I think, particularly for a director, so I’d love to work with him again.

His energy is very infectious and he obviously enjoys the collective nature of music, and film also is a very collaborative form. He totally embraced that -- everybody’s opinion was welcome and taken very seriously and you have to have a lot of confidence to be able to do that, I think. As for Leslie, I just can’t wait to hear her next [project], whatever she decides to do. A supremely talented lady. And I thought the performance she gave in that little film was brilliant. As I said earlier on, to be able to convey emotion without words, that’s quite something. If somebody writes you a beautiful monologue, or you have a beautiful scene and you do the words justice, you should be okay. But she had to do the whole thing completely without any verbalization and that’s something.

Yeah, it was gorgeous. I think we can leave it there, except I have to mention it’s St. Patrick’s Day. You have any plans?

No, I generally hide away on St. Patrick’s Day. The only thing I’m looking forward to is “The Simpsons” St. Patrick’s Day episode where they go to Ireland and Homer and Grandpa Simpson buy a pub that they can’t afford apparently. [It’s the first episode of the animated series to air in the U.K. and Ireland before the U.S.] So I’m looking forward to that. [laughs]

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Playboy, December 19, 2017.

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A bootleg audio of Enda Walsh’s “Misterman” - one-man show starring Cillian Murphy.

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Rise of the blue-eyed boy

Cillian Murphy's piercing gaze has featured in films such as Batman Begins and The Wind That Shakes the Barley; now he has set his sights on the theatre. Jasper Rees meets him

Cillian Murphy is the bashful owner of the most dazzling sky-blue irises since Peter O'Toole's lit up the Jordanian desert in Lawrence of Arabia.

Jeepers creepers: Cillian Murphy

"It would be foolish to become self-conscious about it," he says, "because I just see them as for looking through. It's not anything you can ever think about."

So film directors tend to think about them for him. Danny Boyle shoots them in close-up in both 28 Days Later and the forthcoming sci-fi thriller Sunshine. Wes Craven beams in on them in the plane drama Red Eye.

As the Scarecrow in Batman Begins, he at one point wears a sack over his head with peepholes, echoing a scene in the ensemble film Intermission, in which Murphy wears a monster mask to disguise himself from his ex-girlfriend. The scene has only one flaw: she can still see his iridescent peepers.

If the eyes have it, they currently face competition from a ragged and startlingly ginger beard that Murphy has grown for a new play that reunites him with the director of Intermission, John Crowley.

"I had always wanted to work with him on stage because I thought his work was incredible," says Murphy. "When I came to London as an actor who had done nothing, I remember going to meet John and just asking for advice. He was very supportive. But it had to be the right material."

The right material turned out to be Love Song, a new play by John Kolvenbach, whose On An Average Day provided a hit for Crowley and Woody Harrelson four years ago. The beard belongs to a character called Beane, who, when we meet him, has an ingenuous, almost autistic lack of irony and disconnection from all social norms represented by his sister and brother-in-law. His world view changes when he meets a beautiful stranger.

"It sounds corny," says Murphy, "but when you're in love, everything from the cheesiest Phil Collins love song on the radio to a turkey sandwich can be the most incredible thing in the world. My character goes from his world shrinking to falling in love and everything becoming vivid and Technicolor. Actors love to make that transformative leap."

Murphy, 30, made his first transformative leap in his late teens. Growing up in Cork, he had been in bands "for as long as I can remember" and had embarked on a law degree, "which was without doubt the wrong way for me to go".

He had what he calls "an epiphany" at a production of A Clockwork Orange in Cork City. "It was in a nightclub and it was promenade. It was totally removed from the proscenium arch and eating sweets. That's what made me go and ask them, 'Can I be in a play?' I had no idea that it would ever turn into a career."

The play he successfully auditioned for a year later was Disco Pigs, Enda Walsh's portrait of an intense, symbiotic love affair between two Irish teenagers. As it won awards and travelled beyond Ireland to Edinburgh, London and Canada (and was later made into a film), Murphy found himself a professional actor.

"I assumed I would be working in theatre and then maybe get a part in film here and there. That's what I hoped for, and it's worked out a bit better than that."

He worked in theatre for four years. It was only after Boyle cast him as the lead in 28 Days Later that directors started to notice. He was cast as a creep or two, but Neil Jordan with Breakfast on Pluto and Ken Loach with The Wind That Shakes the Barley were both persuaded that he could be the moral heart of a story.

There are a lot of film stars treading the boards these days, but few in quite the prime of professional life that Murphy has entered since he last acted on stage three years ago in an Irish touring production of The Playboy of the Western World. Why go back?

"You could work all the time in films, but the bar would drop significantly. I have tried to be patient and choose very, very carefully what I do in film. It was a choice between doing a not-great movie or doing a wonderful play. It's an easy choice to make."

His sense of what constitutes a great movie has been sharpened since working with Loach on his drama about the factions within the Republican army in the early 1920s.

"That was a stand-alone experience. None of the superlatives that you draw on when talking about Ken Loach quite seem to hit it. He is all the good things you read about." (Typically, alone of Murphy's directors, Loach didn't make a big thing of the blue irises.)

That's not to say Murphy feels remotely apologetic about his foray into Gotham City. "I was terrified because there is a history of Batman villains being pretty amazing. I was a huge Batman fan. I had a Batsuit, I had a Batmobile, I watched all the movies, all the cartoons. All of a sudden, I was in that world and it was very hard not to react like a 10-year-old child."

He has also had to contain his excitement in Love Song. In a cast that also includes Kristen Johnston, best known here for her outlandish performances in Third Rock from the Sun, and Neve Campbell of Scream fame, is Michael McKean, who played the feather-mopped lead singer of the spoof metal band Spinal Tap.

"I'm in a play with David St Hubbins!" says Murphy. "I have to be careful not to bring it up every day."

Out of respect for the master, he declines to discuss his own musical output, other than to say that Sons of Mr Greengenes, the school-of-Zappa band he fronted, was offered a record deal he doesn't regret not signing. It's hardly surprising that the next best thing to rock stardom has also been dangled in front of him.

"I've been approached to play a number of dead musicians, and I've turned them down each time because I feel it's a hard thing to pull off. There are few rock biopics that have been successful. I just think it's risky territory. It's very hard to catch the sense of what a group was or to catch the personality or spark, and then you end up doing an impression of somebody, which to me is not interesting."

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British Glamour

November 2003

By Deborah Joseph

Photographer: Alex Reilly

He's Irish, hangs out with Colin Farrell and is heading for big things... but Cillian Murphy is no bad boy. Deborah Joseph meets the up-and-coming actor with eyes you could drown in.

Having cancelled me three times in two weeks, I finally get to meet not Tom Cruise, not Brad Pitt, but 27-year-old Cillian Murphy (pronounced Kill-ian). Not heard of him? You will. That's why I've booked and cancelled two flights to Edinburgh in the hope of catching him. I've waited all week for an interview in London. Finally, five days later, I'm summonsed (sic); he's available tonight in a hotel. I do the only thing a self-respecting girl who's been stood up can do, and turn up late, determined to dislike him.

I know I'll recognize him from his eyes; huge translucent whirlpools, haunted by disease and death in 28 Days Later..., watery and stoned in his new film Intermission, and darkened by a mass of long hair in Girl With a Pearl Earring, due out in January. In contrast, his look today is grungy muso: slouchy army jacket, tight scuffed jeans and skinny legs. He assesses me suspiciously until I request a beer, at which point he visibly relaxes. I may be a journalist, I may be late, but at least I drink! And beer! I think it's going to be OK...

So come on then, I say, what's with the cat-and-mouse chase? "I'm sorry," he shrugs. "I've been so busy, I've not even had time to scratch my arse. I was doing a play at the Edinburgh Film Festival last week, then I went to the States and Dublin, and now back to London to start filming Red Light Runners tomorrow. It's with Harvey Keitel and Michael Madsen: a dream."

I guess that's what happens when your film (28 Days Later...) has just made massive waves in the U.S. Now he has another three films coming out: first off, he's staring in the crime comedy Intermission, with his friend Colin Farrell...

"I knew Colin when he was in Ballykissangel, long before he became a zillionaire," he reveals. "I rarely see him now, but we hung out then. If we went for the same part he'd call me and say we should go out on the piss—and we did. He's not competitive, because obviously he's far more successful."

So what was it like working with him on Intermission? "You have to be on form to keep up with Colin," he laughs. "It was boozy. Normally, I'd never drink while I'm working on a film, but my character probably drinks a lot, so it was all in the name of research."

Cillian plays a supermarket worker who gets embroiled in a bank robbery. Has he ever been in trouble with the law? "Only for riding a bike without due care and attention. I got put in a cell for two nights. It was horrible, but probably softened by the amount I'd had to drink," he laughs. Is that really as bad as you get? "Really. I bloody hate this image of Irishmen as bad boys. We have artistic souls—there are many writers, poets and musicians." Doesn't Colin Farrell exacerbate the bad-boy image? "But with him, it's not contrived," Cillian insists.

Cillian's research for his part as Scarlett Johansson's butcher boyfriend in the beautiful adaptation of Tracy Chevalier's best-selling novel, Girl With a Pearl Earring, was somewhat different. "I learned to carry the pigs and cut the meat in an abattoir." He screws up his face. "The smell was pretty vile. And I'm a vegetarian. I haven't seen the film yet," he admits. "But I loved the script."

Cillian's worked with some major stars now, including Natalie Portman—"breathtakingly beautiful"—and Jude Law—"a great guy"—in Cold Mountain, also due out next month. But he was most excited about meeting Jack White from The White Stripes, who's also in the film. "He was so cool. We had a long, long chat about music. I was so in awe."

Cillian grew up in Cork with music in his family. While many of his contemporaries were playing rugby and being typical lads, he spent his childhood singing around the piano with his parents and siblings, and singing and playing guitar in a band with his brother.

Cillian's reported to have a girlfriend, but refuses to discuss it. He will reveal, however, that he prefers dark women to blondes. "I like kooky, intelligent women with something interesting about them. Maggie Gyllenhaal is cute. She's a brilliant actress and is not your standard beauty. I've never met her, but thought she was incredible in Secretary."

What he can't understand is the relationship between two of the world's most famous brunettes, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. "You'd imagine Ashton-whatever-his-name-is has the pick of the bunch. Good-looking bloke, famous—and he picks Demi Moore. I like older women, too, but she's just not my type," he smiles.

It's raining when we finish our chat and a power cut has brought London to standstill, so Cillian offers me a lift. In the car he confesses he met Westlife on a plane and, as boybands aren't his thing, was incensed when they tried to talk to him. He says he once studied to be a lawyer, but pleads for us not to name this article Murphy's Law. He may not be Brad Pitt, but Cillian Murphy is bloody funny and has amazing eyes and he's certainly redeemed himself in mine.

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Stephanie Trong: What secret urge do you get but never act on?

Cillian Murphy: Women [laughs]. Or screaming in inappropriate places,

like on the tube in London. People are so tense and ridiculous, you feel

like going mental sometimes.

ST: What's the worst you've ever screwed someone over?

CM: Firing someone from this band I was in just because he was handsome

and we were jealous. We gave him the shaft and he didn't deserve it.

ST: Who's on your "celebs to make out with" list right now?

CM: Maggie Gyllenhaal. I think she's pretty foxy. She seems smart.

ST: If someone forced you to get a tattoo at gunpoint, what would it be?

CM: Nothing lewd, because that's what I would do if I was drunk.

Something that would represent loyalty in some way, in some other

language. I think it's an important trait that has been overlooked.

ST: Have you ever faked an orgasm?

CM: Yes. I was young. You never think of men [doing it], but it's just

as possible.

ST: Did the person know?

CM: No. I'm an actor, for God's sake.

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Alternative Press - July 2003

By Adam B. Vary | photographer: Lee Locke

(TEXT VERSION)

Cillian Murphy may not be a stateside sensation, but you just wait. Adam B. Vary reveals the naked truth about when Irish eyes are riling.

Age: 27

HQ: London, England

You may know him from: If you’re a Brit, the highbrow modern horror sensation 28 Days Later…, directed by Trainspotting’s Danny Boyle. If you’re a Yank, you’ll have to wait until the film’s June 27 release to see what the bloody big deal is—and we do mean bloody!

You’ll see him soon in: The period-costume dramas Girl With The Pearl Earring (sic), co-staring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth, and Cold Mountain, where he shares the screen with Jude Law and Natalie Portman.

What He’s Listening To: “I’ve just been listening to the new White Stripes a lot. I like their audacity. I like the way there’s just two of them. I like [Jack White’s] guitar playing. I think there’s a bit of a "two fingers” [ie middle-finger] commerciality [with them], you know what I mean? I like the mystique about them, whether they’re married or not married, or brother and sister, and all that. I think it’s fantastic.“

The first good look most Americans will get at Cillian (pronounced "Kil-ee-an”) Murphy will leave little to the imagination. He’s naked—we’re talking spread-eagle, let’s-see-what-you’ve-got, full-Monty nude. What’s more, Murphy says, he’s “not too bothered about it.”

Maybe some background is in order: The birthday-suit scene in question is from 28 Days Later…, a modern-day spin on the zombie genre that scared the kidney pie out of Britain last fall and is due for U.S. release June 27. In it, Murphy plays Jim, a London bike messenger who wakes up, naked, in an abandoned hospital, and discovers he must contend with an England evacuated of virtually every living soul. That is, except for the “infecteds"—bloodthirsty, brutal automata carrying a fast-acting blood-borne virus that makes its victims content only to kill, and kill often. (The title refers to the chronological jump the film makes from the botched laboratory raid that releases the virus to Murphy’s alfresco awakening.)

It is, pardon the pun, a killer premise, and Murphy is clear that his character’s declothed debut is a perfect fit. "It made complete sense to me,” he says. “I think it’s a very arresting image to be greeted with when you meet the protagonist of a film… I wanted to try [to] give an image of a child or somebody completely without any resources, really completely abandoned.”

Born in Cork, Ireland, the lanky, finely featured actor has had better luck. A year and a half into a law degree, he landed his first acting gig at 19 with a why-not audition for a local play called Disco Pigs, about a boy and a girl so close they create their own language. The play’s big-screen adaptation caught the eye of British director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, The Beach), who asked Murphy to read for 28 Days Later…; and, two more auditions later, Murphy found himself before Boyle’s digital-video camera with mobs of red-eyed infecteds bucking the zombie creep. “[Boyle] cast athletes [as the zombies], so … they had these guys fucking bootin’ it toward you,” Murphy recalls. “It does become terrifying.”

Murphy says it was most unnerving, however, filming the jaw-dropping five-minute sequence in which his character stumbles around utterly empty London landmarks like the London Bridge and Piccadilly Circus. “You so associate [London] with bustle and rush and chaos and just this heave of people,” he says. “I’d walked down all those streets every day—its’s weird, seeing all those landmarks just desolate.” Desolate to a degree, anyway. “It was very much guerilla filmmaking,” Murphy says with a fond glint to his south-Irish brogue. “[We would] have about five minutes [per location] to catch every bit… At the corner of the edge of the frame, there’s people screaming to get to work.”

The four-day July shoot was so grueling that the production took a month-long break, resuming photography on September 1, 2001. Ten days later, as Murphy puts it, “events overtook the film.” The timing is peculiar, an apocalyptic film—about a virus called “Rage"—hitting theaters amid a global war against terror. Murphy can understand the ambiguity.

”[Immediately after 9/11], part of you was going, ‘Oh, my God, we’re just making a stupid film, [when] horrendous events have taken place and the world is in chaos and all.’ But then, there’s a part of you that says also, 'We’re making a film that reflects this [feeling] as well, or, I think, comments on it in some way.’ I definitely think [the film] does say something to Americans now, about paranoia and the feeling that we’re all vulnerable nowadays. You’ve got to comment on that.“

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Time Out New York - 10-16 November 2005

By Anthony Kaufman | photographer: William Ciccocioppo

(TEXT VERSION)

Cillian Murphy’s big year culminates with an incandescent performance—wearing a dress—in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto.

All you do is play the creep.“ That’s what Irish actor Cillian Murphy heard all summer thanks to roles as chilling psycho killers in Batman Begins and Red Eye. But in Neil Jordan’s 1970s-set fable Breakfast on Pluto, Murphy plays a strikingly different part—a happy-go-lucky transvestite persevering in the face of prejudice during a period of bloody civil strife in Ireland.

"I didn’t consciously say I had to make this movie now to counteract other choices” Murphy, 29, explains from the patio of the InterContinental hotel during September’s Toronto International Film Festival. In fact, he says, he wanted to play Patrick “Kitten” Braden, the bubbly cross-dresser in search of his long-lost mother because it was “a once-in-a-lifetime role.”

Glammed up, purring seductively and dressed in a variety of fashions from “black leather terrorist” to “Indian squaw,” Cillian (pronounced “KILL-ee-in”) Murphy makes for a most appealing cross-dresser—a type of person, he admits, he hadn’t known much about. “With most characters you have a reference point, but I had none here whatsoever.” To prepare for the role, he sought out a transvestite who agreed to dress him up and take him to clubs, where he gained valuable insight into his character’s psyche.

“What I noticed about all these transvestites I went out with is that they’re so quick and witty because they spend their whole life having insults thrown at them, says Murphy, who lives in London with his wife, Yvonne, and newborn son, Malachy. "They can be as bitchy as fuck, but it’s a total defense mechanism. Kitten has that too, because the character has been hurt so much and has built up this shell.” More specifically, he survives various traumas—starting with being left at a church door by his mother, and moving through repeated beatings, an attempted rape, and further instances of abandonment—with a childlike idealism that never caves in to encroaching despair.

A fan of both director Jordan (who’s mixed bombs and trannies before, in 1992’s The Crying Game) and Patrick McCabe’s 1998 novel, on which the movie is based, Murphy auditioned for the role four years ago. When Jordan dragged his feet, Murphy turned on the pressure, “It’s the kind of film that, if you can’t find the actor for the role, it wouldn’t really work,” Jordan maintains, “I tested Cillian and he was so alive and moving. But I was a bit nervous about revisiting issues I had covered before—you know, with the cross-dressing and the terrorism. So I put it aside and kept working on the script. And Cillian kept coming to me and saying, ‘We have to do this movie. I’ll be too old by the time you make up your mind.’”

When the film finally began shooting, Murphy threw himself into it. “I loved all the grooming. I loved dressing up. I loved looking beautiful,” he says. “I suppose that’s the energy of the character, that effervescence and irrepressibility and energy that carries her through life.” His favorite garment was the fur jacket Kitten wore during some of her lowest points. “And I sill managed to look pretty chic,” he jokes. The character’s ebullience even infected his daily life. “Generally, when I work I stay off the booze and I’m clean, but I was in party mode the whole time,” he recalls. “It’s not a conscious thing, but the character was probably the reason.”

In Breakfast, the costumes and the characters who wear them reflect a libertine subculture from decades past. “Because of the androgynous vibe of Bowie, Jagger, and [T.Rex glam rocker] Marc Bolan, everyone was fucking with their sexuality a bit, so you could have total license,” Murphy says. “It was probably the coolest era for dressing.”

As a musician himself (from age 17 to 22 he played guitar and sang with his brother in a Frank Zappa-inspired band, the Sons of Mr. Green Genes), Murphy also used the film’s tunes to get into character. “During the '70s, there was lots of serious, progressive music,” he says. “And then there was all this fluffy, nonsensical music, which is what we used. It’s very saccharine and over the top, and Kitten finds deeper meaning in these trashy songs.” Murphy even sang on one of the movie’s tracks—the Lee Hazlewood-Nancy Sinatra hit “Sand"—for which he voiced the female part next to punk notable Gavin Friday, who has a small but pivotal role in the film.

While Murphy identified with certain aspects of the era the film captures, he lacks firsthand knowledge of his homeland’s history of violence. Born in Cork in 1976, he has little memory of the Troubles. "You might see it on TV, but it was very remote for me. And I’ve never been politically minded as far as the IRA struggle,” he says. “Unless you lived in that part of Ireland, anyone from my generation and from a middle-class background—both of my parents were teachers—would say that,” he continues. “I can understand why people become politicized and would use physical force. I understand it, but I’m against it.”

Sounds as if a bit of Kitten’s guilelessness has yet to leave Murphy. “It’s incredible to come across a character that is totally benign,” he says. “He hasn’t a bad bone in his body. I just thought that was amazing.”

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Acting Up

For rising star Cillian Murphy, all of Hollywood's a stage. 28 Days Later... secured his fame and the new Batman will surely cement it, but celebrity is still the one role he won't play.

This has been a significant day for Cillian Murphy, but not in the career-making way you might expect. There are days that have probably been more important: the one, for instance, several years ago when Murphy was standing in line for a Ryanair flight from London to Dublin only to learn he had scored the lead in 28 Days Later..., the artsy zombie movie that went on to become a sleeper hit. Or the night last August in Edinburgh, when he was summoned to Los Angeles to audition for the new Batman just as he was playing his final performance in a three-and-a half-hour stage production of Chekhov's The Seagull.

But this February day—an unusually sunny one for Dublin, the Irish capital that tends to be animated and lively in inverse proportion to its capacity for blue sky—has marked a first for the slight, slim Murphy, who will turn 28 in May. On his way to the Malaysian restaurant on the south side of the city where we're meeting for lunch, a photographer snapped him "just walking the street." The actor's reaction? "I was like, Noooooo!" says Murphy, prolonging the word in mock agony, though his grievance is clearly real. "It's a horrible thing," he explains of the sort of invasion that, in truth, is likely to become more frequent. "For me, as much as I adore acting, when I'm not doing it, I don't even think about it. I don't live and breathe it." Nor, he makes clear, are the press entitled to live and breathe him.

On the other hand, Ireland, in particular, has always loved a homegrown star, and the country clearly has one in Murphy, who has been a near-constant presence on film and (in the U.K. and Ireland, at least) on the stage, of late. The lazy thinking on the subject has been to lump him with Colin Farrell, Murphy's co-star in the recent movie Intermission, an ensemble effort from theatre director John Crowley in which Murphy plays John, the romantic misfit. (The two actors are friends, even if, concedes Murphy, "I don't see Colin as much as I would like.") But with his pale blue eyes and almost diaphanous skin, Murphy couldn't look less like Farrell, and he cuts a totally different performing figure. While Farrell looks to be cornering the market in rogues—a blokeishness that spills over into reports of his off-screen escapades—Murphy possesses a full-lipped intensity that finds him perfectly at home in a period piece like Girl With a Pearl Earring (in which he plays Pieter the butcher, romancing Scarlett Johansson's bejewelled Griet).

And yet, Murphy can dim the doe-eyed sensitivity. This is an actor, after all, who launched his career in 1997 in the play Disco Pigs and its subsequent film version. In both, he played Darren, a.k.a. "Pig", a teenage psycho from Murphy's home city of Cork who thrives on antisocial behaviour and gets off on starting brawls. The character is as willfully self-destructive as the lovesick, suicidal Konstantin—Murphy's Edinburgh Festival role in The Seagull—is woefully so. Small wonder that, as Murphy notes wryly, he's "always kind of playing 'damaged.'"

For proof, one need look no further than the theatre role that's keeping him occupied well into April. As Christy Mahon, the braggart of the title in J.M. Synge's 1907 play The Playboy of the Western World, Murphy fully captures the roof-raising brio of the County Mayo tearaway who ends up transfixing an entire town with a story of patricide that, of course, turns out to be false. But Murphy goes where many stage Mahons don't, capturing the loneliness and loss that exist beneath Christy's preening. "Synge described it as a comedy, but it's patently not; it switches from tragedy to farce to pathos and just goes like that within a line."

We're speaking over a vegetarian lunch with many hours to go before this evening's opening night performance, and Murphy talks of needing to "save [his] voice"—and then rather endearingly doesn't, warming animatedly to one theme after another in the course of several hours' chat. "I didn't train, ever, and I'm constantly trying to educate myself in theater, and I feel you learn as an actor hugely on stage. You're seeing through the arc of a character right from the beginning, and that can only help you as an actor, rather than acting in moments, as you do on film." Not that Murphy craves help so much as he does that feeling—crucial to any actor—of moving forward: "My objective is to improve, and this is the best way to do it. I consider myself an actor, not a film actor or a theatre actor, just an actor, and whatever medium offers the best challenge at any given time is what I take."

Another way to better your art is to diversify your pool of collaborators, as Murphy has surely done. Last year, he spent a week in Romania hanging with Jude Law and Natalie Portman on the set of Cold Mountain. Murphy's role as a Union soldier was small, but the movie's impact on him was not. "We were freezin', man, but just to be involved in something like that—every director should have Anthony Minghella's ability to instill calmness, which, I'm sure, percolates down to the xing catering. Here was this gi-normous production, and Anthony was like a little Buddha." As for Girl With a Pearl Earring: "People aren't going to go, 'Hmmm, tell us the history of Pieter the butcher.' He's there; he's a device, and I did it as best I could, despite my unfortunate wig."

If nothing else, the film gave Murphy a first-hand glimpse of the kind of stardom that can beset the really young—leading lady Johansson turned 18 while the movie was being filmed. "Scarlett is a cool girl, and I wish her everything, but I hope she hangs on to that essence of what she has. If that x had happened to me when I was 18 or 19, I would have turned into a xhead," says Murphy. "I would be an x now." That he isn't honours what he refers to as "a very solid upbringing" as the oldest of four children, and to his relationship of seven years with an Irish artist, Yvonne, who graduated last year from London's Royal College of Art. (The two live in the Queens Park area of northwest London.)

An inbuilt sense of proportion no doubt helps too. "I abhor the idea of a personality or a celebrity; I know everyone says that, but it deeply offends me." To that end, he doesn't have a personal publicist—not yet, anyway—and says that three agents (one each in Dublin, London, and Los Angeles) more than suffice. "I've got a lot of people in my life: I don't need any more, and I don't do a huge amount of publicity, really." (Among other things, he has vetoed all live TV appearances and chat shows.) Murphy grimaces as he recalls showing up at a recent shoot for another magazine; it was a joint shoot with two other young actors, and he was the only one without various hangers-on in tow. "They couldn't get over the fact that I was on my own, and I couldn't get over the fact that these guys had an entourage. It seems to me that's the periphery of acting—that's the least important part. That should be the bit you invest with the least amount of energy so that when you have to do the work, you bring the most amount of energy to that. The most important part is work." Murphy speaks admiringly of actors like Billy Crudup, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Johnny Depp as welcome escapees from the PR machine. "They don't need to do it, so I don't xing need to do it, you know what I mean? And nobody's grooming me or pushing me to do something I don't want to do."

Fair enough, but what happens come to the start of shooting at London's Pinewood Studios in May on Batman: Intimidation in which Murphy plays The Scarecrow to Christian Bale's title role? The fifth movie in an extraordinary franchise will surely obliterate any remaining anonymity. "I think I'll be all right, you know?" As reflective as he is opinionated, Murphy muses on the vagaries of a career that he knows has only just begun. "It's obviously surreal, but that's the beauty of the thing. I love the fact that the job we do can be so random, you known, though ultimately it's all the same. Ultimately it's about being true to the script. Ultimately it's about giving a good performance." With that, Cillian Murphy excuses himself, appearing a few hours later on a small stage in Dublin to try out his latest role.

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Sunday World Weekly Magazine

8 February 2004

By Esther McCarthy



Is Cillian A New Colin?

After landing one of Hollywood's most famous roles—the new baddie in Batman—Murphy tells Esther McCarthy he's set for movie mayhem.

He's landed the role of the new Batman baddie, has a growing army of female fans, and is poised to follow in the footsteps of Colin Farrell as one of Tinsel Town's hottest leading men.

But last month Cillian Murphy got a sharp reminder of how fickle the movie business really is. A thriller called Red Light Runners that he was filming in London was suddenly pulled after three and a half weeks of filming, leaving the young actor out of pocket and out of work.

He was in good company however—co-stars left high and dry by the film's demise include Harvey Keitel and Peter O'Toole.

While he's being touted as our next big thing, Cillian is acutely aware of how tough the acting business can be.

"That's the movie business for you," shrugs the 29-year-old. "I still have a lot to learn."

"Just before Christmas, the film was pulled. There were some bad vibes that I picked up but it was still a big surprise."

"It was a money problem. I never got paid. I don't know if I will. It bothered me at the time but now sure f**k (sic) it," he says.

The Corkonian will surely take some consolation from the fact that his next film is set to catapult him into the big league.

After being in major contention to play Batman in Hollywood's latest story about the much-loved comic book hero, Cillian lost out to Christian Bale.

But it may have been the best twist of fate that has yet happened in his career. For this weekend he confirmed he will play the main and as-yet-unnamed baddie in the $135 million film, a potentially juicier role.

Playing Batman's evil rival did no harm at all to the careers of Jack Nicholson, Danny De Vito, or Michelle Pfeiffer and Cillian is thrilled at the prospect.

"I've been cast as the main villain of the piece which is great because Batman is the coolest of all the super heroes," says the star.

"It's a long shoot and it starts next month, but I'm looking forward to it. One of the main reasons I'm doing it is because Christopher Nolan, who made Memento, is directing it. He's a great guy."

While most actors would jump at the opportunity to become a major star, Murphy chooses his roles cautiously.

And with roles in films like Cold Mountain, Intermission, and Girl With a Pearl Earring, as well as a brilliant lead performance in 28 Days Later... under his belt, he seems to have the Midas touch.

Although he's aware of the heat around him, Cillian is a bit reluctant to label himself the next big thing.

He worked with Colin Farrell on Intermission last year and the pair are on friendly terms, but can he act his way to superstardom like Colin?

"It has got to the stage where I get shown more scripts but I'm still there hoping that the good ones turn up," he said. "I still get offered some awful s*ite and have to chase the good roles that I really want to do."

Cillian first discovered his flair for acting when he joined the drama society while studying law at UCC.

"It was seven years ago. I went for law because there were hardly any hours," he says. "It was never really important to me."

At that time his real passion was music and he was a regular on Cork's local live circuit, playing guitar and singing with a Frank Zappa-influenced band called Sons of Mr. Greengenes.

"We played all around Cork and it was my main ambition, I was really into it. Since I was a kid it was what I wanted to do, it was hugely important to me at the time," he says.

Performing a play on the Aran Islands is a world away from the glamour of a Batman movie. But before he joins the caped crusader this spring, he's returning to the stage. Fans of the actor will get an opportunity to see him play Christy Mahon in Synge's much-loved Playboy of the Western World.

The Druid production is touring Ireland from this month, playing everywhere from Dublin's Gaiety Theatre (opening Feb. 23) and major towns like Castlebar and Tralee, to more remote places such as The Aran Islands, Geesala in Co. Mayo, Dun Choain in Co. Kerry, in a scheme designed to trace the steps of Synge's play.

It couldn't be more unlike the bright lights of Hollywood and that's the way Cillian likes it.

"I started out in theatre doing plays like Disco Pigs and you don't get as many good parts in film so doing this is great," he says. "Christy is just a brilliantly written character and this is very close to being a perfect play.

"There's a lot of diversity that this game offers you if you're lucky, like I've been."

Based in London for the past three years, he says he can't see himself moving to Los Angeles.

"I've done the casting thing over there but I don't think it's for me. I could go to New York but not L.A."

The huge success of 28 Days Later... in the U.S. has led to offers and he's got a couple of possible roles after Batman that, like most actors, he's staying coy about until terms are finalised.

"It's not like I have a big career strategy or anything," he explains. "The only criteria is I'd like to be able to look back and not go: "Oh Jesus, I can't believe I did that."

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RTE Guide - February 6 2004

By Donal O'Donoghue

(TEXT VERSION)

The irresistible rise of Irish actor Cillian Murphy had led to the inevitable comparisons. But the 27-year-old, who plays the villain in the next Batman movie, is very much his own man. Donal O'Donoghue met him at Galway’s Druid Theatre.

Upstairs at the Druid Theatre, Galway, all is quiet. Rehearsals for The Playboy of the Western World have been suspended for the day, as one of the principal players has taken ill. Now I’m awaiting the arrival of the other lead. Cillian Murphy appears clutching a bag, out of which peeks a copy of The Playboy. He is a slight figure with ebony hair that flops over a finely featured face punctuated by piercing blue eyes. Physically, he seems almost too delicate to capture the comic savagery of playboy Christy Mahon. But the young Cork actor’s track record has proven just why he’s being trumpeted as one of Ireland’s most promising talents. Not that, I suspect, Murphy would have much truck with such claims.

Murphy, who lives in West London, spent the previous weekend in Galway. He went to see Lost in Translation and had a few pints in the city’s boozers. “The graveyard of ambition,” he sighs, as he pushes back his chair so that it teeters on two legs. For most of the interview it remains like this: a man on the edge who sucks in the questions, tasting them to see what they might look like when the answers are recycled in print. But as he later details, the actor has reasons to be caution. “I’m 27,” he says, contrary to reports that have placed him anywhere between 25 and 30. “My mother is appalled at that misinformation because it makes her older. Of course I’m six foot one.” And you played rugby? “I never played f***ing (sic) rugby.”

Truth, the first victim of fame, is being twisted around Cillian Murphy’s ever-rising profile. Next to Colin Farrell (with whom the inevitable if wearing comparisons are made), Murphy is the most in demand young Irish actor in Hollywood. Last month Vanity Fair, the glossy bible of makers and movers, devoted a page to the Irishman’s rise. His potted biography pivoted around the highpoints that he was the star of the U.S. sleeper hit of last year, 28 Days Later…, and is set to play the Scarecrow in the next Batman movie.

Still, Murphy is wary of being promoted as being the next big thing: and even more wary of believing in it. “Christy Mahon is a fellow who begins to believe in his own myth which is something that we are surrounded by today,” he says of his latest role. The underlying inference is clear.

I first met Murphy when he was cast in a minor role in a 1998 production of Juno and the Paycock at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre. Apart from an award-winning performance in the scintillating stage play Disco Pigs, the Corkman (from Ballintemple) was a virtual unknown: just another pretty face with high hopes. But in that interview he was bright, personable and sharp as a tack, and a few months later I briefly bumped into him in a Dublin pub where he thanked me for giving his granny honourable mention in the article.

Not much has changed. Murphy loves the art of acting but is anxious that the machine doesn’t swallow him up or change him into something not true to his ideals. Maybe for this reason he splits the career between stage and screen, between productions like The Seagull and The Playboy and Intermission and Girl With a Pearl Earring. Everything he does, he says, he wants to be able to look back and say it was good. It is a commendable ambition, but as the world wants more and more of Murphy it might become increasingly difficult to stick to his guns. He has Los Angeles in his sights but has no plans to live there. Hollywood makes good movies as well as bad, he argues, just as nothing in life is black and white.

His C.V. suggests an actor drawn to darker, more ambiguous characters but he says that there is no reason why he wouldn’t do a romantic comedy if the script was right. In short, his plan is simple: to do work that he believes in.

Cillian had no formal acting education. In fact, early on he nurtured ambitions to be a rock star. “Musician, I’d prefer,” he says. “Yes, since I was about ten or eleven. There was a lot of music in our house. Both my father and grandfather played music and I was in several bands with my brother Padraig.” The most serious of these outfits was the Frank Zappa influenced, Sons of Mr. Greengenes. They wrote their own songs and Cillian played rhythm guitar and “sang a bit.” “It got pretty serious with the offer of a record deal but we didn’t bother going down that road,” he says, “My parents would have been (he searches in vain for the right word)… at losing myself and my brother to the clutches of the music industry.”

At this time Murphy was studying law at UCC, an unhappy affair that lasted eighteen months. “I didn’t have a great experience in college but it was probably my own fault,” he says and leaves it at that. At UCC he scored his first major role in the drama society’s production of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. “It was more to get the chicks and to get drink,” he says of his involvement. “I didn’t think it was really going to lead to anything.”

In any case, he was busy with Sons of Mr. Greengenes and he wanted to bail out of academia asap. “I wanted to get out of college, I wanted to get out of home. It’s like what every 19-year-old kid wants to do.” He considers his answer for a moment, as if anticipating where the narrative might be going. “Every article is like called ‘Murphy’s Law’ and it’s made more of a deal than anything else. (Leaving college) wasn’t such a big deal. It’s what you’re supposed to do as a young man, isn’t it? To try things out?”

Murphy got his first big break when he was literally picked off the streets to play Pig in the stage-play, Disco Pigs: Enda Walsh’s dazzling original that stormed Cork, Edinburgh, and London in 1996 and 1997. “It was a brilliant opportunity to see the world and have a laugh,” he says. “I had never been to America or many places in Europe. I got to do all that and meet loads of interesting people and get drunk and it was great. There was no question in my mind that I wouldn’t do it and I learnt a lot. Corcadorca (the production company behind Disco Pigs) were brilliant to me and took a big chance in casting this young fella off the streets.”

After Disco Pigs he moved to Dublin where, after treading the boards for sometime, Murphy began to get a toe-hold on the screen including Sunburn (which failed to get a theatrical release in Ireland), The Trench and TV mini-series The Way We Live Now. Despite positive reviews 28 Days Later…, a post-apocalyptic zombie flick passed by largely unnoticed in this country and the U.K. America was different. “They got it on every level over there,” he says. “In a way it overtook events like SARS and the war in Iraq. And it was very cleverly marketed.”

Afterwards, the scripts arrived but he was careful about making his next move. “I was 26 when that happened so you’re not like a 17-year-old kid who is overwhelmed by America and all that. You realise that you should be in it for the long haul and try and pick stuff that is a bit more artistic and worthwhile.

In recent months Murphy has had minor roles in Cold Mountain and Girl With a Pearl Earring and played the lead in the hit Irish movie, Intermission. But the movie that could change everything is Batman: Intimidation. He auditioned for director Christopher Nolan for the title role last year. It was great,” he says, “You got to dress up n the suit and say: 'I’m Batman.’ It was one of the most exciting things that I have ever done.” Murphy didn’t get the lead, but was signed up to play arch villain, The Scarecrow. When I mention this he clams up. “I don’t know how much I’m supposed to say about this. I don’t even know if I am or not. I’m not allowed to talk about the script.”

But he will talk about Batman, his favourite superhero. “It’s not just about kryptonite and tights, it was real dark drama,” he says. “A lot of my favourite films (La Haine and Mean Streets) would be of a dark nature and I don’t think it has anything to do with me being unhinged. I just find those things more interesting.”

“Hollywood makes great movies as well as schlock,” he continues. “It’s very openly cynical about that. They will say if you do this we’ll allow you to do this and this. So it’s about making choices and for me it’s about creating a legacy that you can be judged on. So far I can put my hand on my heart in saying that most projects I have done I have believed in. That’s what I want to continue to do. Ultimately, you want it to be about art, and while that might sound pretentious or idealist, that’s my agenda.

And so it goes. Next up is Red Light Runners, a thriller in which Murphy co-stars with Harvey Keitel and over the coming months The Playboy of the Western World will retrace the wanderings of Christy Mahon’s odyssey across the western seaboard. "And then,” says Cillian, “I do that Bat thing.”

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Cillian Murphy out in Dublin | 24 April 2018

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Today 9 years ago (29.03.2009)- Cillian at the Jameson Empire Awards 2009

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Today 11 years ago (07.03.2007)- Cillian at the IFC First Take and MoMA of ‘The Wind That Shakes The Barley’

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peaky blinders gala screening [HQ]