Cillian Murphy drops his head into his hands and groans: “Ah, man! I’m not digging these questions. Genuinely.” The 33-year-old Irish actor, Batman star and blue-eyed pin-up has thus far taken it on the chin. He is in the bar of a swank Toronto hotel, enjoying a break from filming his new Leonardo Di Caprio thriller Inception. We have, however, momentarily entered the “silly buggers” section of the interview.
Who, for instance, would win a wrestling match between Murphy and his fellow Celtic screen stars Colin Farrell and Michael Fassbender? “I’m definitely not answering that. I can’t,” he says, chortling nervously. Does he ever think about dyeing his eyes? “No, but I did actually wear brown contacts for my last film, just out of curiosity.” When was the last time he cried? That one sends him over the edge. He says that it’s not fair. “I want to think of something witty to say, preferably untrue,” he protests. “But I need more time.”
If the questions seem unduly flippant, it’s only because they echo the tone of Murphy’s latest movie, Perrier’s Bounty. A crime flick set in contemporary Dublin, it features Murphy as a disgruntled son who resents his conman father (Jim Broadbent), owes money to a mobster (Brendan Gleeson) and falls in love with a suicidal neighbour (Jodie Whittaker). It’s a film both witty and ramshackle that explores similar territory to the “Celtic noir” worlds of Murphy’s Intermission or Farrell’s In Bruges. Thus it also boasts a bestiary of loquacious hard men and booze-sodden eccentrics who spin wildly around Murphy’s sullen and sad-eyed centre.
“That’s the way it was written,” he explains. “I am the eyes of the audience, the Everyman in the movie. I’m surrounded by these larger-than-life characters. So all I do is play the situation, and play my reactions.”
Murphy does this a lot on film. Playing the reactions, drawing you in without seeming to try. The Oscar-winning film-maker Danny Boyle, who has directed Murphy twice — in the horror flick 28 Days Later and the sci-fi movie Sunshine — says that Murphy “has that thing. Beyond acting technique is this strange thing that makes you put your hopes and fears into him as a lead actor.”
Similarly, Christopher Nolan, who directed Murphy in both of his Batman movies and again in Inception, has waxed lyrical about the actor’s magnetism: “He has the most extraordinary eyes. I kept trying to invent excuses for him to take his glasses off in close-ups.”
Murphy concedes, reluctantly, that he is aware of the hoopla surrounding his crystal-blue peepers. He adds, though, segueing neatly out of the silly section, that it is never a case of just turning up on set and flashing the camera a look, Zoolander style. “Giving them ‘blue steel’ on cue would be very depressing indeed,” he says. “But I try not to think about it too much. And I suppose it didn’t do Paul Newman any harm.”
He says that he is not a Method actor, rather a self-declared research nut who goes deep into the background of his characters “out of respect for the world you’re trying to inhabit”. Hence for Sunshine, where he played a physicist cruising towards the Sun, he spent so much time shadowing the “rock star” physicist Brian Cox that he adopted the professor’s mannerisms and physical idiosyncrasies. “He had a way of sitting and holding his hands that I stole,” Murphy says.
Equally, he spent weeks in full make-up and glamour outfit haunting the transvestite clubs of London before playing a cross-dresser in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto. “I learnt straight away where these guys get the speed of their wit,” he says. “As you’re walking through Soho you just get it every minute, the insults and the cat-calls. You have to be highly trained with comebacks.”
It’s all a long way from a nightclub in Cork in the mid-1990s where, as an impressionable 18-year-old, Murphy was wowed by a local production of A Clockwork Orange (“It was unbelievably sexy and dangerous and all those things that would appeal to a teenager”). Up until then, as the eldest of four children born into a family of progressive arts-inspired teachers (including uncles and grandparents), Murphy had planned a musical career. A guitarist and singer with the Frank Zappa-inspired rock band Sons of Mr Greengenes, he was offered a five-album deal with the East London label Acid Jazz Records. After much soul-searching he turned it down (the financial remuneration was not enticing) and eventually abandoned the group entirely to pursue the newly acquired buzz of provincial stage acting.
His rise through the ranks was swift: within four years he had made his theatrical debut in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs, built a successful homegrown screen career and moved to London with his future wife, the artist Yvonne McGuinness (they met at a Greengenes gig). It was in London that he starred in Boyle’s zombie hit 28 Days Later. “That was the watershed film for me,” he says. “That was the one where people actually saw a film that you were in and said: ‘God, you’re that guy! Silly Ann Murphy!’ Which was a start.”
Murphy still lives with McGuinness in northwest London, and is now the father of boys Malachy, 4, and Carrick, 2. He says that he’s had plenty of “pinch me, is this real?” moments in his career (mostly involving his role as the arch-villain Scarecrow in the rebooted Batman movies), but it is his family who pull everything into focus for him. “I love acting, but they show me that there are other things that are more important in my life,” he says, adding that his kids have no idea what he does. “They think that I unload the dishwasher for a living.”
He finishes by running through his forthcoming movies (all five of them), including Inception (“It’ll be unlike anything you’ve ever seen”) and Dalí and I, the Salvador Dalí biopic starring Al Pacino. “That one’s all up to Pacino,” he says. “It hasn’t started yet. Obviously he hasn’t decided.”
He talks some more about his love for music, about his competitive running habit (he ran the Paris half-marathon last year) and about hanging out with his close friend “Cols” Farrell in LA. He says that he has no plans for his career and no ambitions, other than to work on some theatre next.
He then stands up to leave, smiles to himself, and finally says the words: “Reading the road.” Sorry? “The last time I cried. Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” He gives a little nod of triumph and skips out of the room. Happy, it seems, to have said something not witty, but true.
Perrier’s Bounty is released on March 26
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