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"I'm a character actor"+ Barley bits
07 April 2007 at 01:35 AM | by Melty_Girl
The shy thespian
The Event Guide out of Dublin has a nice little feature on Cillian, which includes his reflections on acting versus celebrity:
"I’m a character actor," says Murphy. "At least, they’re the sort of roles that I’m most interested. If they also happen to be the leading man occasionally, that’s fine, but I’m not interested in getting the girl, or saving the day, in the traditional leading man sense. You very rarely get interesting stories coming out of that. And part of my desire to do my job well means not being a celebrity. I would just be crap at it anyway—red carpets just make me nervous. But even if I could handle all that, I don’t think I want to be popping up in the morning papers, waving to the crowd at some premiere. The less people know about Cillian Murphy the easier it is for me to do my job."
About working in Hollywood, he said,
"I certainly have no desire to go to LA," he says. "It’s just a place where, if I stayed there for more than a week, I’d go completely and utterly crazy. It’s just not the sort of environment that I can work in."
A young Daniel Day-Lewis?
Still months until the Sunshines on me, but I finally saw The Wind That Shakes the Barley on the big screen, and it packed a serious wallop. Happily talked politics and film with friends afterwards, but with y'all I can also squee about how Cillian uses those baby blues to devastating effect. In the penultimate scene, Damien, with eyes cast down, listens to Teddy beg; but when Cillian at last looks up and opens his eyes—boom!—it is powerful when he makes his stand. Yow!
See more screen captures from The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Barley finally opened out here in generally left-leaning Northern California this weekend to rave reviews. Ruthe Stein of The San Francisco Chronicle writes,
The film immediately has you in its thrall and doesn't let go—a reminder of how powerful and moving cinema set in wartime can be when all the elements align. By refusing to romanticize the idealism of youth and instead illuminating how it leads to horrendous mistakes in judgment, the fine British director Ken Loach takes a guerrilla conflict from almost 90 years ago and makes it as disturbingly fresh as today's news out of Iraq or Afghanistan. There can be no second-guessing (as occasionally happens) the judges at Cannes who bestowed its highest prize, the Palme d'Or, on Loach's masterwork.
After remarking on Cillian's "commanding presence," Stein postulates oddly (emphasis mine),
Murphy is all jangled nerves pacing the hillside where the revenge killing is to take place. Wailing afterward about how "I've crossed the line," his face visibly hardens. It's the same actor's trick (almost surely aided by makeup artists) that Al Pacino pulled off in The Godfather.
Does she really think that Loach would go in for that kind of trickery? Or that Cillian needs makeup to project grief?
The Contra Costa Times' Mary F. Pols enthuses,
As Damian [sic], Murphy continues to demonstrate a chameleon-like talent reminiscent of the young Daniel Day-Lewis. ...His Damian is so passionately moral that he convinces us to believe in the cause just as fiercely. Murphy is rapidly becoming reason enough to see a film. But in this case, the film and the actor deserve each other.
The Bay Area Reporter calls Cillian "transcendant," and The East Bay Express says that
Barley possesses the soul of an antiwar movie and the style of a thriller, ... a tension perfectly embodied in Murphy's soulful characterization..."
And over in the Midwest, four stars for Barley. Calling Cillian "superb," Jim Emerson of The Chicago Sun-Times declares,
With almost tactile immediacy—you almost can smell the smoke and the wild grasses in the hills, feel the rain and the fog in your bones—this movie places you shoulder to shoulder with people who are living and dying for their country, their families, their friends and their principles.
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