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No More Mr Nasty Guy
Harper's Bazaar U.K.
July 2008
By Francesca Martin
[Image of article here.]
He's made his name playing a psychotic killer and an insane scarecrow, but in his latest role—opposite Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley in the film of the summer—Irish actor Cillian Murphy is in full-on heart-throb mode. So is he hero or monster? Movie star or ukelele-loving family man? Francesca Martin goes in search of the real Mr Murphy.
For a few years now, Cillian Murphy has been living a quiet, happy life in north-west London, plucking occasionally at his ukulele—while playing on-screen a series of, as The New Yorker puts it, "elegantly seductive monsters". In contrast with friend and fellow Irish actor Colin Farrell (both were born in May 1976), Murphy has often been typecast as the psychotic foe, most notably as Dr Jonathan "Scarecrow" Crane in 2005's Batman Begins.
Finally, however, director John Maybury has recognized what female viewers have long known: that Murphy's high cheekbones, piercing blue eyes and considerable charm could be put to far better, more swoon-worthy use. This month sees Murphy sweep Keira Knightley off her feet in the period literary drama The Edge of Love, and become, at last, a bona fide leading Hollywood heart-throb.
Scripted by Knightley's mother, Sharman MacDonald [sic], The Edge of Love follows the relationships between Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (played by Matthew Rhys), his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller) and his former teenage girlfriend, singer Vera Phillips (Knightley), during World War II. Joining this love triangle is Vera's admirer and, later, husband William Killick, a handsome, floppy-haired English army officer, played by Murphy. The film takes a dark turn when Killick is called up to fight alongside the Resistance in Greece, and Dylan, Caitlin and Vera escape bomb-strewn London to live on the Welsh coast, where desires and jealousies bubble to the surface.
Beautifully shot, the film sees Knightley give the most emotional performance of her career—even revealing a fine singing voice—and she is perfectly coupled with Murphy as the strong, dashing officer who captures her heart. For producer Rebekah Gilbertson—whose grandparents were Vera and William Killick, the inspiration for the film, and who was able to show Murphy pictures and letters from her grandfather—the actor was absolutely the right choice for the part. "He was brilliant casting, as he has the integrity that William had," she says. "My grandfather was great fun; a very brave, gentle man, but at the same time he had this loyalty, and Cillian has that to him. One of my aunts saw him in some of the rushes and said, 'He's perfect!'"
Director Maybury agrees, and points out the vulnerability Murphy portrays when his character returns from fighting. "Cillian is probably the best Irish actor working today," he says. "He is one of the most subtle and nuanced actors I've ever worked with, and he brought a weight and strength to the role, especially when he comes back from the war period. You were damaged goods, but you weren't allowed to express that, and Cillian does it with a mastery that I think is remarkable." It was this complexity and change in his character that most appealed to Murphy. "William suffers all the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder—dislocation, flashbacks—which are compounded by what is happening in his personal life, and living in a small village in Wales where everybody is talking about him," he says. "What is tragic though, is that it wasn't recognized as an official disorder back then. Luckily, both in the film and in real life, there is a happy ending."
While Murphy was busy perfecting his English accent and Knightley was transforming herself into a girl from the valleys, the biggest challenge, according to Murphy, fell to Matthew Rhys in the role of Dylan Thomas. "It means so much to every Welshman," he says. "I mean Matthew was playing the favourite son of Wales!" The most intense outside pressure, however, was on Knightley and Miller in form of the paparazzi. When the crew went down to Newquay to shoot for three weeks, Murphy stayed in a cottage on the bay and went for long walks, listening to stories from the locals about Dylan Thomas, while Knightley and Miller were being stalked daily. "It's not a pleasant thing to witness happening to such cool girls, and it makes it very hard for them to concentrate on their job," says Murphy. "I totally admire them for putting up with it—if I walked out of my house every morning and there were 15 men waiting to photograph me, I couldn't do it."
The paparazzi were out in force chasing Miller again on the set of Hippie Hippie Shake, also filmed last year, in which Murphy plays Richard Neville, the counter-culturalist editor of alternative magazine Oz, with Miller as his girlfriend Louise Ferrier. Directed by Beeban Kidron (of Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason), the film called for Murphy to immerse himself in the sexually hedonistic era of the late 1960s—something he seems to have relished. "It was really fun," he says. "We recreated the King's Road, wearing long wigs and these Afghan coats. I became really obsessed with the Sixties for a while, especially by the music, like the Beatles' track 'Revolution'. It must have been such an exciting time to be alive; people were so much more optimistic about changing the world."
Currently in Iowa on the set of his latest film Peacock, Murphy sees a strong parallel between the spirit of the 1960s and the current election race in America. "Iowa was a real turning point in the election, and it was really exciting to see that," he says. "It gives you hope when young people are once again getting excited about politics. I am optimistic the Democrats will win—in this day and age, it is amazing to think their contest is between a woman and a black man." Film critics are far more excited about Peacock, though, which co-stars one of the hottest young actresses in Hollywood—Ellen Page, from the Oscar-winning Juno. Murphy plays the role of a mild-mannered bank employee whose split personality, playing both the husband and wife in his marriage, is exposed when a train crashes into his back garden. "It is the most frightening but at the same time most alluring part I've been asked to play—two characters in one film," he says. "The script is so strong, and it was unlike anything I'd read in a long time."
It's certainly challenging, but Peacock isn't the first film for which Murphy has dressed as a woman. His role as a transvestite in Breakfast on Pluto (2005) brought him international acclaim—but it was a typical choice in a career that Murphy admits he only "stumbled into". The eldest of four children from Cork (he still retains a strong Irish lilt), his first love was music. Until he was 20, he played in a Frank Zappa-esque band with his brother; they were offered a record contract but his parents disapproved, as his brother was still in school.
While studying pre-law in Cork, Murphy saw a stage production of A Clockwork Orange in a nightclub and begged the director to let him audition; this landed him the lead in the play Disco Pigs, and later in the film version. The role of a dysfunctional, aggressively unhinged teenager in the 2001 film was to set a trend in his career and led to his breakthrough role in hit zombie film 28 Days Later… (2002), directed by Danny Boyle. Smaller parts in Girl With a Pearl Earring, in which he romanced Scarlett Johansson (and had to learn how to chop meat at an abattoir, despite being vegetarian), and Cold Mountain were followed by the major part of the Scarecrow in Batman Begins. Having originally auditioned for the part of Batman, which later went to Christian Bale, Murphy has admitted that he was glad to have at least tried on the Batsuit, even if he didn't get the part.
Murphy followed the Hollywood blockbuster by playing an IRA freedom fighter in Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley. He only got to audition because Loach asked a childhood friend of Murphy's to cast it—it took seven meetings until he was hired, but the film won international acclaim, including the Cannes Palme d'Or.
He played another psychotic killer in Wes Craven's thriller Red Eye (2005), before collaborating again with Danny Boyle, as a physicist in the sci-fi thriller Sunshine last year. Murphy is back as the Scarecrow in The Dark Knight, the next Batman instalment out this summer, but in a much smaller role this time. "It is all about the Joker, and even more so now that Heath (Ledger) has died, " Murphy says. "He gives an incredible performance; it's electric. People are going to be really knocked out."
After Iowa, Murphy is due to play Salvador Dali's art dealer in Dali and I: The Surreal Story, with the role of the artist played by Al Pacino. Because of the forthcoming actor's strike, though, the film has been put on hold. "It is sort of on an orange light at the moment, " says Murphy. Until then, he will head back home to Queen's Park in London, where he lives with his wife, Dubliner Yvonne McGuinness, whom he met at one of his gigs when he was 20. Ever the romantic, Murphy proposed while they were hillwalking in Wales, and they got married in 2004. They have two sons—one two-and-a-half years old, one 10 months—who Murphy says keep him grounded, together with running and listening to music. "I enjoy playing music on my guitar or ukulele and messing about with my buddies [a group of friends from Ireland that he is still close to], but I don't have the time to play seriously. At the moment I'm listening to the electro band MGMT and a lot of Bob Dylan, probably because I'm in America." Not one for the celebrity circuit, Murphy insists that he only talks to the press in connection with a film opening, and he avoids star-studded parties.
Something Murphy does make time for, and which he appears equally passionate about, is his theatre work. "I try not to let too much time lapse between appearances on stage," he says. Having appeared in the West End with Neve Campbell in Love Song, directed by John Crowley, and at the Edinburgh Festival in The Seagull, he says that he would love to do a stint on Broadway next. He's an actor who clearly relishes the immediacy of appearing on stage, and it was this kind of vitality that he loved about Maybury's method of working on The Edge of Love. "He's a real artist in the way he composes scenes," Murphy says of the director. "There is little rehearsal and very few takes—two if you are lucky—so you get a real freshness, and you have to rely on your instinct, instead of intellectualising about a character. You really have to live in the moment as that person."
As grounded in his attitude towards his celebrity as Matt Damon, yet with the same penchant for unusual roles as Guy Pearce—who also came to the critics' attention by cross-dressing, in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—Murphy believes showbusiness is something people shouldn't rush into. "Acting shouldn't be allowed until you're at least 20," he says. "I didn't have any official training, and in fact, I lost my voice once because I didn't know how to use it technically. I've never done much classical work on stage, probably because I didn't feel that I had the confidence, and maybe that comes from going to stage school. What I did have, though, was a bit of life experience that gave me the confidence to try different things in my career. I probably would have been wealthier being a lawyer, but I would have been miserable doing it. Now I can take on whatever piques my interest, whatever represents a challenge."
Should the romantic leads and psychotic arch-enemy roles dry up, though, Murphy can always go back to playing his ukulele. "I'm really a frustrated musician," he says. "Give me a mic, or even better a karaoke machine, and I'm there."
