With 'The Seagull' in Edinburgh, 'Intermission' set to open and '28 Days Later' a US hit, Cillian Murphy is on a roll, writes Michael Dwyer
Every summer yields a surprise hit movie in the US, a low-budget production that steals the thunder of the blockbusters. Last year it was the innocuous romantic comedy, My Big Fat Greek Wedding; this summer it is Danny Boyle's gritty, scary post- apocalypse drama, 28 Days Later. Made for just $6 million, it has taken $40 million in the US alone, far more than anyone expected, not least its star, the 27-year-old Irish actor, Cillian Murphy.
"I'm very surprised," he says. "It can be taken as a zombie film or a horror film, but I never did from the first time I read it. I thought it was much deeper than that. I didn't think Americans would respond to its contents and to its violence, but they seem to have understood it completely.
"On one level, the film deals with this modern phenomenon of rage - air rage, phone rage and so on - and then it was overtaken by all the fear about SARS, so people could relate to England being quarantined from the rest of the world to contain the virus."
Having the starring role in such a successful movie is valuable exposure for Murphy, and certain to bring many other roles his way, but he is quite sanguine about it.
"They put a lot of merit in box-office success, and I've never before been in a movie that's made money," he says. "I don't have a career plan, but if its success helps me get a few better scripts or to meet some directors I've always wanted to meet, that would be wonderful. But I don't intend to be in the next teen movie. Even if that kind of film were offered to me, I think my agents are attuned enough not to send those scripts on to me."
Cillian Murphy was born on May 25th, 1976, in Ballintemple, Co Cork, the eldest of four children, two boys and two girls. His father is a schools inspector and his mother teaches French.
"It's a family full of pedagogues," he says. "My grandfather was a headmaster and all my aunts and uncles are teachers. But I decided to stay as far away from the teaching profession as possible."
Instead, he studied law at University College Cork, but dropped out halfway through his second year to pursue his interest in acting. He and Eileen Walsh were cast in the original Corcadorca production of Enda Walsh's powerful two-hander, Disco Pigs, at Triskel in Cork. The play went on to receive rave reviews at the Dublin Fringe and Edinburgh festivals, and on an international tour, and Murphy reprised his role, as a charming psychopath, in Kirsten Sheridan's riveting film of the play.
His subsequent prodigious output has been divided between theatre, television and cinema, featuring in Garry Hynes's acclaimed Druid productions of The Country Boy and Juno and the Paycock; as Paul Montague in the compelling four-part BBC series based on Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now; and as a suicidal 19-year-old man in On the Edge, and the much-suffering son of a gruff farmer in How Harry Became a Tree.
"I'm just trying to mix it up," he says. "There's no one medium I want to concentrate on. I just want to learn more and more, especially to try to play roles where I really have to act, to have to create characters I know nothing about, to research them and learn about them."
Next week, he will be seen on screen and on stage at the Edinburgh Festival.
He joins Colin Farrell and Colm Meaney in the splendid ensemble cast of the blistering Dublin comedy-drama, Intermission, which marks an immensely assured joint feature film début for two bright Irish theatre talents, writer Mark O'Rowe and director John Crowley. Murphy has been committed to appearing in Intermission ever since he first read the screenplay.
"It was a long time falling into place," he says. "Getting it made had a lot to do with Colin's participation - his name helped get it off the ground. I thought it was the best script I'd read in a long time, and I've been a big fan of John Crowley's work as a director.
"Very early on, when I did Disco Pigs in the West End, I asked to meet him and he gave me great advice. I auditioned for him, which went really well. It was a fantastic shoot - everyone dived in and gave their all. John gave us notes that were incredibly precise, but not prescriptive. He never missed even the tiniest details."
Murphy had played the Colm Meaney character's son in How Harry Became a Tree, but he had not worked before with Colin Farrell, who is two months older than him.
"I'd known Colin socially for a few years," he says, "you know, the way actors end up drinking together."
In Intermission, Murphy plays John, a bored supermarket assistant bereft after his girlfriend, Deirdre (Kelly Macdonald), has left him for a balding, older man (Michael McElhatton). For all his bravado, John is essentially naïve and vulnerable, and Deirdre leaves him only because he has issued a stupid challenge, that they break up to see if she really loves him.
"That's a very Irish male thing, I think," Murphy says. "He just wants to know that she wants their relationship as much as he does, and all he has to do is ask, but instead he takes this roundabout, obtuse approach that pushes her away. The film is a very sharp investigation into the male Irish psyche.
"All the male characters have this deep sensitivity within them, but they keep this camouflage around it, this weird logic, and all it does is hurt themselves and other people. The screenplay is a brilliant piece of writing - there's a rhythm and a music to it."
On Monday, Murphy opens in the new production of Chekhov's The Seagull at the Édinburgh Festival, which will be his first stage appearance since he featured in Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things at the Gate in Dublin last year. Murphy plays Konstantin in The Seagull, with fellow Cork actor Fiona Shaw as his mother, Arkadina. The cast also includes Iain Glen as Trigorin, Jodhi May as Nina, and Dearbhla Molloy as Polina.
This production is one of the hottest tickets at Edinburgh this year, due to its strong cast, and because its director is the celebrated German authority on Chekhov, Peter Stein.
"He is a genius, the über German director," Murphy says. "He's up there with the Peter Halls and Peter Brooks. He's brilliant. He has directed Russian casts in Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters.
"Part of the deal was that he wanted us to go to Melikhovo, about two hours from Moscow, where Chekhov had his estate and where he wrote The Seagull. After this, Peter Stein is doing a Latvian production of The Seagull in Riga and he wanted us to meet our counterparts in the Latvian cast. We drank vodka and hung out with these incredibly intense and serious actors. It was fascinating. After three or four days in Russia, Peter took us all to his estate outside Rome, to rehearse for three weeks. We've six weeks' rehearsal, even though the play is only going to run for two weeks, whereas we only had time for a week's rehearsal on Intermission, which is fairly standard for a movie."
The conversation turns to Zonad, a zany unofficial pilot film for an Irish TV series by the Bachelor's Walk team of John and Kieran Carney and Tom Hall. Earlier, John Carney had directed Murphy in On the Edge.
"The Carneys and Tom Hall are some of the funniest guys around at the moment," he says. "We made Zonad just with little DV cameras and I just laughed all the way through it. I saw some of the rushes and they were so funny. It's set in Ireland, but everyone speaks like Americans. I play this alien who arrives in this village in Ireland. Everyone thinks he's incredible, but he's just a big drinker who tries to pick up all the women."
The third series of Bachelor's Walk has to be shot and edited before the makers make any further progress with Zonad.
Later this year Murphy will be seen in Peter Webber's movie of Tracy Chevalier's best-selling novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring. He plays Pieter, the young butcher who falls for Griet (Scarlett Johansson), a maid who models for one of Vermeer's most famous paintings and also gets romantically entangled with the painter, who is played by Colin Firth.
"It's a very popular book and when I read it I could see why," Murphy says. "It's really compelling, a book you would read in one sitting. My ambition is to do different things, so it was great to go from Intermission to that. I get to wear this long wig. Everyone knows someone with the characteristics of John, my character in Intermission, which doesn't necessarily make it any easier, but I had no reference-points at all for this butcher, Pieter."
Murphy also played a part - a small one, he insists - in Anthony Minghella's new film, Cold Mountain, which opens here at the beginning of January. Based on Charles Frazier's novel and set in the dying days of the American Civil War, it features a star-studded cast led by Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger, Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Giovanni Ribisi and Brendan Gleeson.
"I was just on it for about a week, in Romania," Murphy says. "I play this deserting soldier who comes across the main character, played by Jude Law, and we have a pretty grim scene. John Crowley is a calm director, but Anthony Minghella is the calmest director I've met. Maybe it's a symptom of being on top of everything. It's a massive production."
Looking ahead, Murphy says he hopes to play Christy Mahon in Garry Hynes's new Druid production of The Playboy of the Western World early next year.
"It's an ambition of mine to play that part - he's like an Irish Hamlet - so I hope that happens."
Meanwhile, as he prepares for the opening of The Seagull, he notes that there is something special about it for him. "At last my granny will get to see me in something. She's coming to Edinburgh for The Seagull. Everything else I've done isn't suitable for her!"
• The Seagull opens at the King's Head Theatre, Edinburgh on Monday
Intermission goes on Irish release from August 29th; Girl With a Pearl Earring opens here on November 7th