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A Young Irish Actor Revisits His Country's Bloody Past

The Star-Ledger

11 March 2007

By Stephen Whitty

Ireland is an ancient land, but it's a young country. The grand old buildings on Dublin's O'Connell Street still bear the wounds of British bullets. Only a few generations separate its cosmo-sipping yuppies from the grave men who plotted revolution over dark pints of stout.

As the star of The Wind That Shakes the Barley was reminded of again, just recently.

"Just after we finished the film, my da told me how my grandfather had been shot at by the British for playing a fiddle," recalls Cillian Murphy. "He was playing Irish music, and the British had outlawed that, the way they'd outlawed everything then."

He pauses, and shakes his head in wonder.

"All of this," he says, "is really only two generations removed."

"All of this" is the bloody birth of modern Ireland, a fitful, furious few years in the early '20s that included both a war of independence from Britain and a civil war between the Irish themselves, as they argued violently over what sort of peace, and country, they would have.

And the film Murphy's starring in—which opens in New York on Friday—dramatizes it by focusing on two brothers, one a cool pragmatist eager for any victory, the other a sure-of-himself idealist who will settle for nothing less than a united socialist republic. Murphy, well cast, plays the idealist.

At Cannes, the film won the Golden Palm. In Ireland, it became the biggest independent film in history. In England, meanwhile, it was denounced as historically inaccurate and practically treasonous. Even polite liberals—the "soft left," director Ken Loach calls them—drew back, offended by the movie's violence and supposed endorsement of the IRA.

"What they, of course, miss out on is the violence that has always come from Unionist side, and the British military side," says the soft-spoken Loach, a hard-line socialist whose films include Riff-Raff and Land and Freedom. "The IRA is part of the struggle for a united, independent Ireland, which the Irish voted for and the British refuse to accept."

What the film meant to Murphy, though—a high-cheekboned, bright-eyed 30-year-old who last terrorized American audiences as the airplane assassin in Red Eye—was not only the chance to tell his country's story but to work with a man he calls "one of the world's greatest living film directors." It was a chance he seized, even if it came about unconventionally.

"Ken's so out of the box," Murphy says smiling, curled up in a New York hotel on a wintry day. "I didn't even hear about it through my agent, but from this girl I know who used to live on my road, and was working as his casting director. There wasn't even a script ... But he only wanted actors from Cork, because that's where it's set, and that qualified me for an audition."

"Oh, we just met and had a go at some bits and pieces to see if he'd enjoy it and if it would work out," Loach says of the casting process. "He's a thoughtful man, a reflective and observing man, and his instincts were right. The greatest thing an actor like Cillian has is his instinct. You can see it behind his eyes."

Growing up in Ireland, Murphy's instincts didn't tell him he'd end up an actor.

"I come from a long line of pedagogues," he says. "My mother was a teacher, my father was a teacher and then a civil servant, my grandfather was a headmaster. There were no actors, and it was nothing I grew up with the desire to do. But there's a lot of music in the family, on both sides, so I guess there was a performance gene there somewhere."

Growing up, Murphy wrote songs, and drummed in a band as a teenager. But it wasn't as satisfying as he'd expected.

"I wanted to be a rock star like every kid but there's a reality to that that's not so alluring," he says. "In a band, you know, it's five 20-year-olds arguing and trying to make a group decision and just signing their lives away. And my brother was in the band too, so my parents were going to lose the two of us into the jaws of the music industry. It was just a horrendous vista."

Then Murphy went to a nightclub to see an arty adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. He was so struck by the visceral, immediate impact of live theater, he badgered the director into giving him a part. The director was so struck by the young man's energy and charisma, he agreed.

"Being in a band was always a lot of attitude," Murphy says. "Being an actor felt more honest, and a truer form of self-expression."

Murphy concentrated almost exclusively on theater for the next four years. "That's where I learnt," he says. "I never had any training or anything like that, but I worked with really good directors, got some great parts, then got a little part in a movie, and then bigger parts, and then leads."

The first big lead came in 2002 with 28 Days Later ..., director Danny Boyle's adrenaline-pumped apocalyptic thriller about a rage contagion that leaves most of Britain rabid and ravenous. Murphy started the movie stark naked, spent most of it fleeing hungry madmen—and ended it as a newly minted movie star with an unusual name. (For the record, it's pronounced Kill-ee-an.)

"That film was the watershed," he says now. "But because I came to success quite late, relatively, I was able to say, 'Right, I've got an opportunity now, I'm going to be very careful what I choose.' I didn't work afterward for quite awhile. Then I did a little Irish movie, Intermission. Then I went back to the theater. I didn't just take what was offered."

It's a sensible strategy perhaps, although not one that most actors are willing to risk. Even Meryl Streep confesses that after every project ends, she's convinced the phone will never ring again. But Murphy—whose Celtic stubbornness is matched only by his youthful cockiness—stuck to it.

"Success isn't employment, but a lot of actors confuse the two," he says. "For me, success isn't how often you work, but the quality of work. I think if you have a little bit of patience and you have other interests and you're able to kick around the house for a bit and wait for the right thing, that's good."

Exactly what "the right thing" was for Murphy changed from project to project. He signed on for small parts in Girl With a Pearl Earring and Cold Mountain. Then, in 2005, he grabbed flashier parts as the Scarecrow in Batman Begins, and the seatmate-from-hell in Red Eye.

So what exactly is the actor who recently informed Premiere he's only interested performing in films that have "aspirations to be a piece of art" doing in a comic-book movie? Or playing a sickie with a knife in a Wes Craven B-picture?

Exactly what he wanted to, he declares.

"Red Eye was all about two actors trying to sustain suspense sitting next to each other in a confined space," he insists. "So that was a challenge. And whatever multimillion dollars Batman (cost), Chris Nolan made it seem like a little independent film ... He has a crew he's worked with for a long time, he takes a lot of interest in his actors. It was really unique in that way."

Although not as unique as Murphy's third movie for 2005, Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, in which he brilliantly played a gay Irish transvestite named Kitten, looking for his father and flouncing his way through the low-rent, high-heel, glam-rock '70s.

"The word auteur has become sort of overused and undervalued, but Neil Jordan is quite extraordinary," Murphy says. "To work with him is amazing—I just put my heart and soul into that one. I love that character ... People call Kitten dysfunctional but actually, it's the world around her that's dysfunctional. She's actually quite strong, and she affects change in all the craziness around her."

Creating a character out of words can require—or engender—a certain kind of craziness, too. Which is where technique comes in. A classically trained actor like Anthony Hopkins, say, doesn't "become" Hannibal Lecter. He studies the character's motivations in each scene. He decides on a few externals—the gaze, the slicked-back hair, the accent. And then, once he has the lines, he has it.

But an untrained actor like Murphy has no technique to fall back on, or hide behind. He has to begin every part from scratch, looking for a way in. The advantage is that he can't use technique as a crutch, the way Hopkins (or Burton, or Olivier) could, and just walk through a performance. The disadvantage is that every movie, every role, starts the process anew.

It's not a process that's adaptable to every situation—it's difficult to imagine Murphy surviving the 70-odd takes David Fincher sometimes called for on Zodiac—but it worked well with directors like Jordan and Nolan. It was perfectly suited for Loach, a filmmaker who encourages his actors to take risks, and makes his set as unlike a set as he can.

"I showed up the first day and said, 'All right, where's my mark?'" Murphy recalls. "And Ken said, 'Oh no, we don't use that word here.' There's none of the nonsense that's normally there. He doesn't say 'Action' or 'Cut.' He uses long lenses, to keep the cameras away. He'll even have the crew turn their backs on you during a take, and he'll look away, and just listen. It makes everything a very, very private moment. I learned an unbelievable amount about acting making this film, stuff that I'll use forever."

"I always have a plan but if I've planned it well, it seems to come from the actors," Loach says. "They feel as if they're following their own course; you just give them a nudge toward something if you need to, and off they go. I think it's fatal to talk it through too much; if you talk about it too much you start to lose it, and the actor is becoming self-conscious instead of just following his instinct."

"Ultimately, you always rely on your instincts," Murphy agrees. "I do like to prepare a lot. I like to do a lot of research. But working with Ken lends itself to a very honest style of acting, not very sexy or cool perhaps, but true. Film acting, you know, can be very self-indulgent. This is not about that ... People here stumble over lines, striving for some sort of truth—you don't see Nicolas Cage stumbling over lines, do you? But that roughness is what gives Ken's films their humanity."

Murphy guards his own humanity jealously. He's only been to Hollywood to shoot films, and didn't like it; he moved away from Ireland because "Cork is a village, really, and Dublin is a small, small city and I like my anonymity." He and his wife—his teenage sweetheart—live in London with their new son, Malachy; the couple goes to the theater and museums and concerts and, in the times in-between, Murphy reads scripts.

And if he likes one, he does it, and if he doesn't, he waits for another. Patiently.

"The whole business is such a weird combination of commerce and art," he says. "For me, if you make one film that people consider a piece of art, then that, to me, is it. You know? If you make one film that some kid watches and goes, 'I want to do that' or 'That made me think about something in a new way' then that's all you can hope for. That's it, really. Just to make one film like that."