Cillian Murphy Q&A

07 July 2009

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Cillian Murphy has emerged as star with Danny Boyle’s ‘28 Days Later’, shortly followed by ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring’, ‘Cold Mountain’. He went on to give standout performances in ‘Batman Begins’ and ‘Red Eye’ as well as Ken Loach’s ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’. He teamed up with Boyle again for ‘Sunshine’.

- What have you done after Sunshine?

That was a long tough shoot. I took a lot of time off and then I went into this little movie called 'Watching the Detectives' which I shot in New York in the summer with Lucy Liu. It's a comedy directed by Paul Soter and then I've just finished a play, ‘Love Song’, in The West End of London directed by John Crowley. So that's what I've been up to.

- Are you just not thinking about what you have to do next? Are you just going with your instincts and finding what pleases you?

What challenges me rather than what pleases me. That's always how I've operated. I try and insist on diversity and again, doing stories that are worth telling.

- You’re committed fully with these parts. does that transfer when you go home? Does your wife look at you and wonder who you are on any given day?

No, she knows who I really am - she's knows me from before I was an actor - but I do think that it takes something from you. There is an absence when you're making a movie. You're absent physically because you're working every God given hour with them, and emotionally I think it does take something from you when you come home.

- Especially when you only have a weekend off, right?

Or a day off. That's generally how much you have off and even then you're just working to prepare for the following day. It's quite exhausting, but I'm loathe to complain about it because this is what I've wanted to do all my life.

Not all my life, but I've acquired this passion for a job and it's wonderful to get to do it, but it can be exhausting.

- So when people say that you're a star or a rising star, what does that mean to you exactly? That you're just doing well in your career or is it something to be avoided?

I tend not to think about any of that stuff. I just do my work and judge myself on my work.

- When you were doing 'love songs' in the West End was your name above the title?

[Laughs] Yeah, but so was all the other cast members.

- How different is it to do a play from a movie? The play is done eight times a week and everything is contained.

I mean, when I started acting that's what I did exclusively for four years. I just did theatre. For me it's all about learning, really, and every time you do a job it's learning.

In theatre I think that there's a much more sort of accelerated rate of learning because you're doing an entire narrative and an entire character arch and an entire sort of journey live onstage and there's this sort of communion with an audience that you don't get in movies.

It's about acting in moments and it takes a long, long time. So theatre is very, very important to me and to be acting every night and twice a day on Thursdays and Saturdays for three months you can only be a better actor out of that, regardless of how good or bad the show is, I think.

- Do you think that movies or theatre have an opportunity to change people's lives as well as being able to tell interesting stories?

I think that our job is to entertain, first and foremost, and if you entertain and you engage then you have a chance to put across a message. You engage and you're entertained and you're emotionally connected to these characters.

You invest in them. So that's the idea, that you say something intelligent with your film, but also in an engaging way.

- How many people don't know how to pronounce your name in this country?

Ah, that's kind of the problem is decreasing, but you know, it's an unusual name, I guess you just have to correct people. It's a hard C.

- Does it mean something?

It was a saint, like most Irish names, they come from saints.

- What was he the saint of?

I don't know. Most of them, there weren't career saints. They just did good stuff.

- Does he have a saint's day?

No he doesn't have a saint's day, no I don't think so. Well he's dead, like what do you? He was a monk I think.

- He was an Irish saint.

Yeah.

- Do you stay in character a lot?

I don't think I find it quite hard talking about that whole method thing, and retrospectively, you can see how a character affects you. My wife can see always how a movie, how a part affects me. Of course, because she has to live with that.

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