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Perrier's Bounty

On DVD/Coming Soon to DVD

James McAvoy almost stole this role, due to Cillian's scheduling problems, but it ended up working out. Cillian plays Michael, a petty criminal on the run with his long-lost father (Jim Broadbent), trying to escape the wrath of the gangster Perrier, who is portrayed by Brendan Gleeson. English actor Jodie Whittaker plays Cillian's romantic interest.

The movie made its official debut at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2009, came out in Ireland and the U.K. on 26 March, and had a late spring limited release in the U.S.A. via IFC Films. The DVD will arrive in September.

Reviews—one of which we previewed here on The CillianSite—were lukewarm to enthusiastic, often comparing the film to In Bruges, which also starred Gleeson, alongside Colin Farrell.

See the Perrier's Bounty page in the Body of Work section.

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Peacock

New to DVD

Here's a real actor's challenge: Cillian plays John Skillpa, a shy bank teller with a split personality who must convince the mid-60s small town of Peacock, Nebraska that he's his own wife, Emma, after his alter ego is discovered when a train derails in his backyard. Peacock is described by Variety as a psychological thriller that will co-star Juno's Ellen Page as Maggie, "a struggling young mother who holds the key to his past and sparks a battle between the personalities." The two stars both say they were blown away by the script by first-time director Michael Lander and newcomer Ryan Roy. Cillian said, "(The script) offers an incredible challenge to an actor—one I couldn't turn down."

The cast was rounded out very promisingly: Susan Sarandon plays the mayor's wife, who runs the town's women's shelter, Bill Pullman is John's supervisor, Josh Lucas plays a police officer, and Keith Carradine plays a bank co-worker.

It was supposed to hit theaters in 2009, but, heartbreakingly, it went straight to DVD in North America on 20 April.

See the Peacock page in the Body of Work section.

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Inception

In Theatres

This is the blockbuster from The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan. Inception stars Leonardo DiCaprio, and a stellar cast. Cillian plays Robert Fischer, Jr., the heir to a fortune, a corporate power broker about to head up a company that competitor Ken Watanabe wants to interfere with. DiCaprio's character and his team, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy and Dileep Rao use a new technology to enter people's dreams and steal corporate secrets, and Cillian's Fischer is their main target.

Inception is already on many film critics' lists of their favorite films of the year. It's a smash, and will hopefully give Cillian's star a new burst of light.

See the Inception page in the Body of Work section.

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Hippie Hippie Shake

Coming Soon?!?

In late 2007, Cillian's career looked poised to take a decidedly sexy turn: he shot a new starring role, playing Australian writer/futurist Richard Neville, the editor of the Australian/British 1960s radical satirical underground magazine Oz and the focus of the longest obscenity trial at that time in British history. Based on Neville's memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake: The Dreams, the Trips, the Trials, the Love-ins, the Screw Ups: The Sixties, which The Daily Telegraph describes as the tale of Neville's "bed-hopping, drug-fuelled antics," Hippie featured Sienna Miller as Louise Ferrier, party girl and girlfriend of the editor, Emma Booth as feminist writer Germaine Greer, Max Minghella, and Nina Liu.

But the film stalled in post-production. Universal Pictures knocked back the distribution of the Working Title Films production from 2008 to 2009, and industry gossip labeled the film as "unreleasable" or straight-to-DVD. Then, as we blogged on 21 July 2009, director Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) and her screenwriter husband Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) walked off the production, and Working Title told The London Times that the film would get a limited release in the U.K. in February 2010. Sienna Miller attributed the delay to the "current economic climate," but this stinks of major creative conflict on the project. It was again delayed, and its prospects are unknown. Will another starring role for Cillian land in the straight-to-DVD pile, like Watching the Detectives and Peacock?

See the Hippie Hippie Shake On Location gallery in the Stage and Screen section of our Gallery.

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The Retreat

In Pre-production

In what looks to be an intense, intimate thriller, Cillian and Thandie Newton will play a married couple who Retreat to a remote island to repair their marriage, only to be confronted by a biohazard-suited soldier Jamie Bell who tells them that all humans on the planet have been wiped out, save the three of them. But is he telling the truth? Producers are calling The Retreat "a landlocked Knife in the Water meets Dead Calm. Sounds inticingly like a mix of the gripping situation of 28 Days Later... and the intimate suspense of Red Eye—sign us up!

The Retreat will be helmed by first-time director Carl Tibbetts, and shoots in Wales in September.

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I'm.mortal

In Pre-production

I'm.mortal is a sci-fi movie set in the future, in which Cillian will play, according to The Hollywood Reporter, "an officer from an organization known as Timekeepers" who is as "precise as the time he keeps," who is in pursuit of fugitive Justin Timberlake. In this near future setting, the rich are able to turn off the aging gene, and after Timberlake's character comes into a fortune, he is framed for murder and goes on the run, kidnapping Amanda Seyfried on the way.

Keep in mind, both Cillian and Justin are in "final negotiations." I'm.mortal will be directed by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, Lord of War), who was supposed to direct Cillian in Dalí and I: The Surreal Story, and is supposed to shoot in October.

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Wayfaring Strangers

In Pre-production

Cillian is to play the lead in Wayfaring Strangers, a World War II film set in German-occupied France. With financing from the Irish Film Board and the backing of several production companies, the film is also supposed to star Michael Gambon and Robert Sheahan.

In the story, British soldiers are being held prisoner of war by the German Army. The twist is that our heroes are being held on a farm owned by a French family who is hiding a Jewish couple on the premises. Sounds like this one could be quite intense.

It's not clear yet whether this is going to shoot this year as reported.

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At Swim-Two-Birds

In Pre-production

Actor Brendan Gleeson (Breakfast on Pluto, Cold Mountain) wrote a screenplay adapting Flann O'Brien's chaotic, multi-layered Irish classic, and many of today's most famous Irish actors have been linked to the project: Colin Farrell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Gabriel Byrne, and Cillian Murphy. A read-through (attended by Cillian) was held in Dublin in early 2007, but news halted there for over two years. Finally, in September 2009, the project was officially announced as a project of Parallel Pictures (sans Rhys Meyers).

Perhaps Cillian will get his wish to play a cowboy—one of the characters in the book is writing a Western whose protagonists turn on him. Director John Boorman (who recently directed Gleeson in A Tiger's Tale) was said to be interested, but Gleeson will make his directorial debut.

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Rumoured Projects

Dalí and I: The Surreal Story

On Hold

Another biopic: Cillian signed on to play another real life writer, Belgian Stan Lauryssens, who was taken under the wing of legendary Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí in the artist's older years. Dalí was to be played by one of Cillian's idols, the great Al Pacino. Dalí was a well-known eccentric, but Lauryssens sounds like he may be quite the character too: on his website, the crime fiction and history author says that before he met Dalí in the 1980s, he was scamming his way across Europe and America selling fake art, fake diamonds and "non-existent real estate."

Writer/director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, Lord of War) was to be at the helm; he rewrote the orignal script by John Salvati, who'd described it as "a black comedy, a cross between Basquiat and GoodFellas." But in an interview with Harper's Bazaar U.K., Cillian stated that Dalí and I "is sort of on an orange light at the moment" due to the potential actors' strike. There is no longer news of when shooting will begin, IMDb has reverted the film's status to "in development."

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White Male Heart

Stalled in Pre-production

What a title! An adaptation of the novel of the same title by Scottish journalist Ruaridh Nicoll, this one promised to be intense. The two main characters, Hugh and Aaron, are rural Highlanders locked in a codependent relationship of hunting, drinking and trouble-making, and when Hugh falls for a vacationing Londoner, and begins to consider leaving with her, Aaron becomes increasingly volatile. There was never any word on which role Cillian would take.

White Male Heart was set to be directed by Peter Mackie Burns. Eddie Redmayne, recently seen in The Other Boleyn Girl, was originally reported as Cillian's co-star, but IMDb later showed Hippie Hippie Shake co-star Max Minghella as the other lead. Then the project disappeared from IMDb, along with web site of the production company, Brocken Spectre.

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Telepathy

Stalled in Pre-production

According to Production Weekly and many other outlets, Cillian signed on to star in the sci-fi picture Telepathy in May 2006. Reportedly, he was to play identical twin brothers, Josef and Viktor Zalenski, whose telepathic abilities make them the subject of a top-secret Russian experiment on communication between earth and outer space. Miranda Richardson, Sam Neill, and Nathalie Press (Bleak House) were also cast. Shooting was initially scheduled to begin in October 2006, but was delayed. After picking up a new producer and a Russian co-producer at Cannes in 2007, director Lesley Manning was reportedly scouting locations in Russia during the summer with shooting to begin in October 2007, but that didn't happen. Cillian's name moved on and off of IMDb's Telepathy page several times, and then news of Telepathy dissipated.

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The Scent of Books

Status Unknown

Back in June 2006, TMZ reported that director Alejandro Agresti (The Lake House) was negotiating with Cillian to star in The Scent of Books as the younger incarnation of one of three 60-ish writers on whom the story centres. Woody Allen and Christopher Plummer were allegedly in negotiations for two of the three main roles. With Italian-American actor Jason Biggs in talks to play a younger version of one of the writers, most likely the young Woody Allen part, Cillian may have been intended for the role of a younger Plummer. This veteran Canadian actor has been in well over a hundred movies, most famously The Sound of Music and more recently Inside Man, Syriana, and Agresti's The Lake House. Unfortunately, no further news has broken regarding this project.

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Cancelled Projects

Once

Casting Change

As we reported on 16 March 2007, Cillian was originally set to star as the busker in Once, the intimate rock musical written and directed by John Carney (On the Edge). The role ended up going to Carney's friend and ex-bandmate Glen Hansard, leader of Irish rock band The Frames, who had composed most of the music for the film. Once's principals have cited differing reasons for why Cillian backed out, ranging from scheduling conflict to his unwillingness to play opposite a teenage non-actor, Czech musician Markéta Irglová, but Carney told ComingSoon.net that the casting decision was made after both he and Cillian realized it would be hard for anyone but the composer to pull off the songs. We don't know if Cillian actually signed, and then broke, a contract, but Hansard told Entertainment Weekly that Cillian was preparing for the film with Carney and Irglová, then pulled out ten days prior to the shoot. Interestingly, Hansard mentioned to Montreal's Gazette that prior to leaving the project, Cillian was going to serve as a producer.

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Red Light Runners

Halted in Production

Co-written and co-produced by lead actor Michael Madsen, this London 2004 heist film had a hard-driving attitude, a hip music video director (Nick Egan), and an exciting cast: Harvey Keitel, Crispin Glover, Roy Scheider, Kate Ashfield, Christopher Penn, David Carradine, and Peter O'Toole, as well as rock stars Gavin Rossdale, Tricky, and Martin Kemp. It also had inexperienced producers: Cillian shot three weeks before the financing disappeared and the project was scrapped.

Initially, in 2002, producers planned to raise funding under the U.K.'s Enterprise Investment Scheme, which offers a capital gains tax cut to investors: they had to raise £2 million, and if they failed, investors would get their money back—and it failed. But the next year, they put together a deal for sponsorship from Audi; the movie was to come out in 2004 at the same time as a new Audi model featured in the film. But financing still sputtered, and despite periodic rescues from various financing sources, the film ultimately spun out and crashed.

In 2009, rough clips of Red Light Runners surfaced on YouTube, giving us a tantalizing taste of what might have been, including a cocky, Cockney Cillian. His character was one of a motley crew of petty criminals manipulated by Madsen's rogue CIA agent into getting into a more serious criminal conspiracy.

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