Cillian Murphy: ‘Moving home from London was the best thing we did’

Cillian Murphy thinks his love of acting comes from an early love of performing music. “My dad found these old VHS tapes recently of myself and my brother playing in our band when we were 15 and 16,” he says on a Zoom call from his home in Monkstown, in south Co Dublin. “I hadn’t seen them in, Jesus, 30 years. It was really interesting to just see the focus that we all had, the commitment to the music. I could see the look in my eyes. That’s all I wanted to do.”

I first interviewed Murphy last year, in the middle of the Sag-Aftra actors’ strike. The strike meant we could talk about his BBC Radio 6 Music show, his youthful musical exploits and his Cork upbringing but not about his acting career or the fact that he was starring in one of the biggest films of the year, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. On Sunday night he might just win the best-actor Oscar for that role – and the strike is over, so we’re talking again.

He has always been comfortable performing, he says. “Going into a room full of strangers as myself, I find that challenging and difficult, but I could get up and do a show for the same people and it’d be fine. Brendan Gleeson said to me once that acting was ‘the shy man’s revenge’. I have a laugh with my close pals, but that feeling that you have to perform as yourself, that’s not something that I feel comfortable with. Normal, everyday civilian life and the life of making work are very separate for me. But I do think one feeds the other.”

[ Cillian Murphy: ‘People in Ireland are kinder and more understanding and a bit more copped-on’ ]

When Murphy’s band, The Sons of Mr Green Genes, ended he gravitated towards theatre despite having no acting training. “What I really connected to was being in a room on a stage and having that sense of connection with an audience, that unwritten contract, that exchange of energy,” he says. “It was really just filling the gap that the music had left.”

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Murphy’s first big role was in Enda Walsh’s play Disco Pigs, alongside Eileen Walsh. They played two feral, codependent Cork teenagers. “It was me and Eileen and Enda and Pat Kiernan,” he says, referring to the director of the now-defunct Corcadorca theatre company, “and it felt like a surrogate band for me. We had our in-jokes and the same sense of camaraderie that we had in the band. When you make friends with people, that stuff happens, and it feels really tight and like a real unit.”

What happened to that live energy when he started making films? “You don’t have the immediacy,” he says. “Film-making is just moments, tiny little building blocks that you hand over to the director, the producer and the editor. Whereas with theatre it’s that one event, that one story, happening every night, live, and you have much more control over it ... I needed to educate myself, so I was watching loads and loads of films, and reading loads and loads of books about it.

“I used to go into Hodges Figgis. They had a cafe where you could get coffee for 50p. They’d fill up your coffee again and again, so I’d just stay there reading books because I had no job. I didn’t do a degree. So that was my degree ... Then, when I started to work with really good film-makers, I just asked a lot of questions. I never looked at the monitor, because I wasn’t confident enough to do that, but it was about trust. When you have a level of artistic trust like I had with Enda early on, you feel free to try stuff that you wouldn’t normally have the confidence to do.”

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I recently rewatched the film version of Disco Pigs, from 2001, and I was struck by how fully formed Murphy seemed as an actor. He was already an intense, physical presence. Has his approach to acting changed over the years? “I think I probably overthought it an awful lot when I was younger and beat myself up and overintellectualised it,” he says.

The breakthrough was when he made The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach’s 2006 drama about the Irish revolutionary era. “That was the massive epiphany moment for me, because of the nature of how Ken shoots. We didn’t have a script, and because you didn’t know what was coming you couldn’t analyse it or prepare. You just had to let go, be available and be in the moment. It was revolutionary for me, and I’ve applied that to all work that I’ve done since ... It was the most valuable lesson I’ve ever learned on a set.”

Murphy still has a tendency to overthink, he says, but he throws it all away when he starts to act. “We have these big machines in our head, and we need to fill them up with stuff,” he says. “But when I go on set I don’t like to rehearse, I don’t like to talk about it, I just like to do it. Through the doing, something comes. It’s wasted energy to sit around and interrogate something endlessly when you’d be better off just using the time to experiment.”

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He returns to the same collaborators again and again – Nolan, Enda Walsh, Danny Boyle, Max Porter. “Most of it is because I’ve become really good friends with them, and you have this trust,” he says. “You can make a fool of yourself and try stuff out, and find the work together ... And also, the thing I don’t talk about enough is the fun. The amount of laughing I do with Enda and with Max. I just love hanging out with them.”

He first met Nolan when he auditioned to play Batman in the director’s 2005 film Batman Begins. “I had seen Memento and Insomnia, and I thought they were just staggeringly good,” Murphy says. “There was a gang of young actors who were being seen [to play] Batman, but I never ever envisaged myself as that role. All I wanted was just to get in a room with him ...

“We met up and spent several hours together, just talking about film and art and our approach to it. It was kind of instant, a connection. And then he saw something in the audition and gave me this other part,” Murphy says, referring to the role of the Batman villain Scarecrow. “It’s a very interesting relationship, because he lives in Los Angeles and I live in Dublin and we don’t hang out. He doesn’t have a phone or a computer, so we’re not texting. It’s a work-based relationship, but it has really, really deepened over the course of the 20 years.”

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What does Nolan see in him? “He tells a story about calling me up and offering me this role in Dunkirk,” he says. “The Dunkirk script was 70 pages. It was really slim, very much a blueprint. And my character didn’t really have an arc. Apparently, I said to Chris, ‘Any chance I could play a Spitfire pilot?’ I wanted to be all cool, like Tom Hardy. And he said, ‘No, I want you to come on this boat with me, and I want us together to find an ending for this character [a shell-shocked soldier]. I know that I can do it with you.’ I’m very proud of that. It’s only a small part, but I felt a responsibility, because it felt to me that he was representing all of those poor men who were sent home destroyed emotionally.”

Do the characters Murphy plays stay with him? He talks about playing Tommy Shelby on Peaky Blinders for a decade. “By the fifth or sixth season he would be driving the car, not me ... I understood the character so well that sometimes he would make the choices, not me.” He laughs. “That sounds really pretentious and wanky, but that’s the truth.”

Murphy accepted the role of J Robert Oppenheimer, creator of the atomic bomb, before he saw Nolan’s script, a red-paged document – because red pages don’t photocopy well – all written in the first person. “Of all the characters I’ve ever played, he was the most morally slippy,” he says. “Chris used this great phrase at the very beginning. He said Oppenheimer was ‘dancing between the raindrops, morally’ ... I knew then that we had to try to see the interiority of the character. I knew that there couldn’t be any flashy acting; it had to be quite small and quiet.”

In one interview Murphy said a key to becoming Oppenheimer was to stand like Oppenheimer. “I’ve always loved acting with my body,” he says. “That’s from working on stage with Enda. There was a huge amount of physicality and physical comedy, particularly in the one-man shows. I’ve always loved using my body as a tool. And I love the fact that you can change it to suit the character ... It affects the way you stand. It affects the way clothes hang on you. It affects the way you walk, how cold you are, or how not cold. That’s really interesting.”

In many scenes in Oppenheimer, Murphy transmits complicated, contradictory feelings with minor movements of his face. How did he do that? “You can reveal an awful lot by withholding,” he says. “Sometimes the more you withhold, the more you reveal. I learned that in film acting and from watching other actors that you can transmit stuff by thinking it. And the camera will pick up on that transmission, particularly if it’s a f**king Imax camera and it’s being projected on to an 80ft screen ... It comes from the inside out.”

Murphy has said that he doesn’t like talking about the way he preps for roles. He laughs. “I think that ship may have sailed over these past few months. It’s been so analysed and examined. I accept that. I’m curious about other people’s process, too.”

Why was he reluctant previously? “A lot of the time you don’t really know why something may have worked,” he says. “You get terrified that if you try to formalise it, it’s going to disappear, and you’re going to be f**ked.”

Murphy has had a reputation for being not hugely easy to interview (though this is not my experience), never unkind or impolite, just a bit reserved. He laughs. “What did Beckett say about interviews? ‘I have no views to inter’ ... I don’t love it when I get asked personal questions. But when I’m talking about the art or the work it’s fair game ... Also, I think this has been such a baptism of fire this past few months that I’ve actually got a bit better at it.”

Why did he choose to follow Oppenheimer with Small Things Like These, a smaller film based on Claire Keegan’s novel about Irish institutional abuse? “I’m really just interested in the story. I’m interested in the way we’re all still experiencing the ripples of what happened with the Magdalene laundries and the Catholic Church. We’re still feeling the aftershock of all of that.”

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Is there a reason he keeps making historical films? “There’s no f**king mobile phones,” he says. “You don’t have to write around the mobile phones. I think they’re the bane of the life of all scriptwriters and novelists ... It’s actually become one of the biggest challenges in telling contemporary stories, this piece of technology. It’s f**ked everything. If you tell a story where mobile phones don’t exist, I think the audience are less tense. They’re not going, ‘Why has she not texted?’ or ‘Why is there no coverage there? That seems a bit convenient.’” He stops and laughs at his own rage. “Mobile phones have ruined storytelling.”

I suggest that Oppenheimer and Small Things Like These are stories about, respectively, nuclear fear and Catholic repression, two things that had a huge influence on the world in which we both grew up, in the 1970s and 1980s. “Honestly, Patrick, I think you’ve thought about it on a deeper level than I have,” he says. “I just went, when I read the book, ‘I can see this as a film. And I’d love to try play that man,’ because I know those types of silent, good men who can’t communicate properly but inside [have] this torrent of emotion and desire and trauma.

“I pestered all my friends to be in it. I got Enda to write it and Alan [Moloney] to produce it with me. I got Eileen [Walsh] in it. Tim Mielants, who directed it, worked with me on Peaky [Blinders]. And then, when I was in the desert with Matt [Damon, on the set of Oppenheimer], he told me about this studio he was setting up with Ben [Affleck], and I said, ‘Oh, well, what about this?’”

It was his first time working with Walsh since their years on Disco Pigs in the 1990s. “The first day Tim put a camera on the two of us, he said, ‘I can just see the history,’ because there was an ease between us. She’s one of my best friends, and I think she’s one of the best actors on the planet ... We were able to go to places that I don’t think I could have done with someone I didn’t know as well.”

A lot of the American journalists who have come to profile Murphy seem to be amazed by the relative normality of his life in Ireland. “Moving home from London was the best thing we did. We have a nice little normal, lovely life here, and I love it. I’m sure I’ll work [in Los Angeles] again, but I have no plans to move there.”

Murphy’s wife, Yvonne McGuinness, is a visual artist, and one of their two sons, Aran, who is 16, has been cast in Taika Waititi’s adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel Klara and the Sun. At home “there’s an awful lot of discussion about books and plays and shows”, says Murphy. “That’s always been the way if you’re two artists who are in a relationship – and then, naturally, the kids get stuck with it.”

He loves talking about art and says that he, like me, can be guilty of overanalysing it. He tells a story about a superfan who went and lived in the grounds of John Lennon’s house. “He had all these theories about every song, and John was, like, ‘Most is just nonsense. I just like to rhyme. I like the sound of the words. There’s no mystery.’ He was so kind and generous about it, but it was also deflating your man’s whole raison d’être.”

Previously we talked about the way that the mood or tone of art is often what determines its success and that that’s often the part that defies logical analysis. “That’s it! And that’s the problem with language. We always have to attach meaning to it, whereas with a painting or piece of instrumental music we don’t ... Enda always says that when someone asks what a play is about, he says: ‘It’s about an hour and a half’ ... I like it when [projects are] difficult and a bit knotty and a bit ambiguous. I hate anything that tells you what to feel.”

Murphy won the best-actor prizes at this year’s Bafta and Screen Actors Guild awards for his performance in Oppenheimer. Has he been enjoying the ceremonies? “Much, much more than I anticipated,” he says. “And mostly because you meet all these people whose work you’ve admired and watched throughout the year, and you get to have a really good chat about this sort of stuff, about art and music and making things, and that’s been, for me, the best part ...

“I will say that it’s been so brilliant being out there and seeing all this amazing Irish talent, seeing Barry Keoghan and Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, and then Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe, who produced Poor Things. It is a staggering footprint we have on the world of cinema.”

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Does Murphy have a theory about why Irish art is doing so well internationally? “I think the most important thing is that we support and encourage and promote the next round, the next generation, all these young film-makers and actors who are coming up,” he says. “I think Screen Ireland is doing a good job of that, and I think the Government has got to keep funding it. I think it’s up to my generation, too, to encourage the next. I remember working with Brendan Gleeson [early on], and he was the most open, patient, kind man. He gave me a lift home and really listened to me when I asked him questions. He had no need to do that.”

Is he more conscious of that because Aran is now in the acting world too? “I am,” he says. He pauses and adds: “And he did that on his own ... It’s the next generation are the most exciting ones. Barry Keoghan and Paul Mescal, it’s kind of staggering how good they are.”

Is he nervous about the Oscar ceremony? “I get nervous, but there’s nothing you can do. I mean, the die is cast, and what will be will be. You just try to have a good night.”

But he’d like an Oscar, right? He laughs and then smiles enigmatically. “No comment.”