The quiet man
Sunday, March 14, 2010 By Andrew Lynch Cillian Murphy
AGE: 33
APPEARANCE: slight, cherubic, piercing blue eyes
NEWSWORTHINESS: his new film Perrier’s Bounty, a comedy thriller set in Dublin, will be released here on March 26
In Perrier’s Bounty, Cillian Murphy plays a young lay about called Michael who owes €1,000 to the meanest gangster in Dublin.
When the debt is called in and his friend, Brenda, accidentally shoots one of the goons who arrive to collect it, the gangster places a bounty on his head, and every hard man in the city is suddenly on his trail. He and Brenda are forced to take refuge in the mountains, accompanied by his eccentric father who is convinced he will die the next time he goes to sleep.
When Murphy first read the script, he must have given at least the odd smile of self-recognition. True, he is from Cork rather than Dublin, his film career has made him financially comfortable and his father is a respectable civil servant.
However, as a young man who yearns for the quiet life, he finds himself becoming a valuable piece of property and spends much of his time fighting off unwanted attention, this will surely count as one his least demanding roles.
After a decade in the film business, Murphy occupies a unique position among Irish actors: instantly recognisable, hugely successful and almost entirely unknown as a public personality.
Some famous people keep a low profile out of social awkwardness, others to preserve an air of mystique. Murphy apparently does it because he believes in the old-fashioned notion that acting is just his day job, the corollary being that his personal life is nobody’s business but his own.
In stark contrast to his friend and contemporary, Colin Farrell, the only other Irish actor of his generation with a comparable track record, Murphy has never been the subject of any tabloid-style scandal.
‘‘Some celebrities live their lives completely in the papers,” he once said. ‘‘I abhor all that stuff. For that to be sustained, it has to be fed. I haven’t created any controversy, I don’t sleep around, I don’t go and fall down drunk.”
In keeping with this austere attitude, he refuses all chatshow invitations and insists that press interviews are confined solely to the film he wants to promote. Journalists who dare to ask him any remotely personal questions are likely to find him shaking his head in disapproval before they even manage to complete their sentences.
He does not have a stylist or personal publicist, travels without an entourage and often attends premieres alone.
Murphy has no formal training as an actor and admits that, in the early days, he often suspected casting agents were asking themselves: ‘‘Who the hell is this langer?” What he does have is a remarkably versatile face, with boyish features that can switch from charming to sinister with just a flicker of his baby-blue eyes.
His most memorable roles to date have included an innocent Cork waif (Disco Pigs), a terrifying American psychopath (Red Eye), a sinister doctor (Batman Begins) and even a confused Belfast transvestite (Breakfast on Pluto).
Ian Fitzgibbon, the director of Perrier’s Bounty has also worked on a number of successful RTE dramas, including The Clinic and Paths to Freedom, says: ‘‘There is something about Cillian that I find fascinating. Even in repose, even when he is not saying anything, you’re watching him. He sort of allows you to experience what he’s experiencing.”
After appearing in some of the biggest Hollywood movies of recent years, including the forthcoming Inception, Murphy almost certainly doesn’t need to take part in small Irish productions like Perrier’s Bounty. Written by Dublin playwright Mark O’Rowe, it stars Brendan Gleeson as the eponymous villain and veteran British actor Jim Broadbent as the erratic father. The entire budget was a modest €5.2 million, a quarter of which was supplied by the Irish Film Board.
Murphy, however, clearly believes he can have the best of both worlds by balancing what he calls ‘‘popcorn movies’’ with independent films more likely to win critical plaudits than huge profits at the box office.
‘‘It’s easy to take the cheque, you know,” he says, ‘‘but if you want to have any longevity, you have to also take things that have artistic merit. I don’t believe in the need to be a tortured artist in order to do great work. I just want to challenge myself with each role and not repeat myself.”
If this approach continues to work as well as it has up to now, he reflects wryly that he might even get to the stage where Americans learn to pronounce his first name with a hard C.
Murphy comes from a long line of educators.
He was born in Douglas in 1976 and grew up in the middle-class Cork suburb of Ballintemple, the eldest son of a schools inspector and a French teacher. Raised on a steady diet of American television and music, his first ambition was to be a rockstar and he wrote his first song at the age of ten.
At the Presentation Brothers College, he was academically clever but felt isolated due to his lack of interest in sport. For awhile, he became unruly, before deciding around his fourth year that getting suspended was not worth the grief it caused. His English teacher, the poet and novelist William Wall, encouraged him to try acting, and he got his first taste of performing at a drama module run by the local Corcadorca theatre company.
In his late teens, he and his brother, Padraig, formed a jazz-rock band called The Sons of Mr Greengenes, named after a song written by their idol, Frank Zappa.
Specialising in ‘‘wacky lyrics and endless guitar solos’’, they were good enough to be offered a five-album deal by London label Acid Jazz Records. With Padraig still in school and little money on offer, their parents strongly disapproved, and the contract was never signed.
Murphy went on to study law at UCC, but quickly realised he had no aptitude for legal terminology and failed his first year exams. His epiphany came when he saw a visceral production of A Clockwork Orange in a local nightclub, following which he begged the director to give him an audition. He duly landed a role in a new drama about two wild Cork teenagers, written by a then unknown playwright called Enda Walsh.
Disco Pigs was originally supposed to run for just three weeks at the Triskel Arts Centre. Instead, it became a hit, transferring to the Dublin Fringe Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe, London’s West End, Budapest and Toronto. Murphy dropped out of UCC, got himself an agent and took a series of small parts in independent films as he waited for his big break on the cinema screen.
His performance in the film version of Disco Pigs - generally considered to be less successful than the play - caught the attention of Danny Boyle, the British director who would go onto make the Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire, but was then most famous for Trainspotting.
Boyle took a gamble by giving Murphy the lead role in 28 Days Later, a quirky horror movie about a bicycle courier who wakes from a coma to find that a virus has turned London into a ghost town populated by flesh-eating zombies. Against all expectations, it became a hit in the US, giving Murphy his first big payday and bringing him to the attention of a mass audience.
In 2005, he made a major breakthrough by playing the lead villain in two high profile Hollywood productions. Originally asked to audition for the lead role in Batman Begins, he was told by director Christopher Nolan that he was too slightly built to be a superhero. Instead, he was given the part of the effeminate but sinister Scarecrow, a job that required the pleasant duty of re-reading the comic books of his youth.
In Red Eye, he starred as a political assassin who terrorises a young girl on an overnight plane journey, another career defining role that almost fell through when director Wes Craven was initially unhappy with his American accent.
Despite all this transatlantic success, Murphy has stayed in close touch with his roots. His theatre work since Disco Pigs has been relatively sparse, but he took the time to tour Ireland with the Druid production of the Playboy of the Western World directed by Garry Hynes.
In 2003, he played a lovelorn supermarket worker who plans a bank robbery with Colin Farrell in Dublin-based comedy Intermission, which became the highest-grossing independent Irish film in history with takings of €2.5 million.
That record was beaten three years later by The Wind that Shakes the Barley (€2.7 million), a portrayal of the War of Independence made by left-wing English director Ken Loach.
Murphy played a young Cork doctor-turned-revolutionary, a role which he said had particular resonance for him, as his grandfather had been shot at by the Black and Tans for playing Irish music.
The film was condemned as one-sided by some British journalists, but won the Palme d’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
Murphy’s forthcoming projects suggest that his determination to avoid being typecast is as strong as ever. He has just completed work on Inception, a sci-fi thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio that will be released in July. Before then, he will begin shooting At Swim-Two-Birds, an adaptation of the classic Flann O’Brien novel directed by Brendan Gleeson and also starring Colin Farrell and Gabriel Byrne.
Although his star in Los Angeles is rising all the time, he insists that he has no intention of moving there full time.
‘‘When people talk about Hollywood, the image it conjures up is riding around in limousines with anonymous blondes,” he says. ‘‘That doesn’t appeal tome in the slightest.”
Instead, he enjoys a quiet existence in London with his wife, Yvonne, a video installation artist and niece of the Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness.
He proposed to her on top of Carrauntoohil in Co Kerry after a day’s hiking in 2003, and the couple now have two young sons. He is a strict vegetarian, runs to keep in shape and only very occasionally lends his name to a political cause such as the Irish ‘Rock the Vote’ initiative that encouraged young people to participate in the 2007 general election.
At the Irish premiere of Perrier’s Bounty in Dublin’s Savoy cinema last Wednesday night, Murphy said he identified with his character ‘‘because he’s a procrastinator, like so many Irish males’’.
His own ultimate ambition, he confirms, has yet to be fulfilled.
‘‘What I’d like to do is leave behind a movie that’s a piece of art. One movie out of however many I make . . . that’s the ultimate goal.”
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