Cillian Murphy: ‘I like going to extremes’

In your heedless rush to see a certain space opera, spare a thought for Cillian Murphy: the much-admired actor has been seafaring and starving for your entertainment.

“I once heard about this mother who would spray all of her kids’ leftover food with insecticide so she couldn’t eat it,” says the delightfully straight-talking Murphy. “You could, alternatively, just put it in the bin.”

There were no such weird tips required for Murphy's own extreme weight loss. Said pound -shedding occurred as part of the actor's duties on Ron Howard's epic Moby Dick prequel, In the Heart of the Sea.

“It was kind of awful but all of us had to lose weight to varying degrees,” says the 39-year-old. “But I kind of like that. I like going to extremes for a film. You remember it as an experience. It’s not just learning your lines, doing them, coming home and going to bed. It becomes a kind of marker in your life.”

Murphy has a hugely varied CV. To date, he has been a nuclear physicist/astronaut (Sunshine), a trans woman (Breakfast on Pluto) and a 17th-century butcher (The Girl With the Pearl Earring). In the Heart of the Sea marks the first time we've seen a swashbuckling Murphy.

"It's true. I've never swashbuckled. Not really. When I read the script – aside from the opportunity to work with Ron because I've grown up watching his films – it felt like a kind of film you don't really see any more. I remember watching Mutiny on the Bounty on TV with my dad for the first time. It's that sort of film. Just an adventure. Some people have asked: What's the message? What does it say about the environment? You can extrapolate such things if you want. But for me, it's just that epic stand-off between man and nature."

The whaling scenes are, nonetheless, shockingly brutal.

"Yes. But a point to note. One that's made in the book that the film is based on [Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex]. When the Nantucket whaling industry was at its height, the number of whales that were killed was only a tiny, tiny per cent compared to the number that were killed once industrialised practices came in. These are guys in row boats with lances."

In the Heart of the Sea concerns the fate of the New England whaling ship Essex, which in the winter of 1820 found itself assailed by a blow-holed creature worthy of the description leviathan.

Howard’s vessel is manned by such seasoned players as Murphy, Chris Hemsworth, Ben Whishaw and Benjamin Walker, and book-ended by a lovely turn from Brendan Gleeson.

The shoot required exotic locations such as La Gomera, cannons capable of firing 500 gallons of ice water and that 500 calorie-a-day diet.

“Only Ron could have pulled this off,” says Murphy of his director. “He’s so genuine and warm all the time. Even out in the middle of the ocean. I think the only way we were able to do this film – because it was a difficult film to do – is because everyone would do anything for Ron.”

Ships, right? Does he have sea-legs now? “Funnily enough when I came back from doing this film my uncle – totally coincidentally – had just done an extensive family tree. And it turned out my mother’s family were shipwrights. When I was doing the film it was like a badge of honour that I never puked my ring up. So I’m guessing it’s in the blood. I’ve always loved the sea. I loved little dinghies when I was a kid.”

Murphy was born to two teachers in Douglas, Co Cork in 1976. He first tread the boards not as an actor, but as a guitarist in the Zappa-inspired rock band The Sons of Mr Greengenes. He read law at UCC but quickly dropped out.

“I wouldn’t have made a very good lawyer,” he says. “I’m not even sure what I was doing there. My parents were quite anxious that I got a good job. So there might have been a frosty period there for a while. We had to work a lot of stuff out. We get on amazingly well now but I know myself, you underestimate how much your kids know. Once they realised I was doing work of a certain quality, things were okay.”

On these shores Murphy first came to prominence as the angry young man at the centre of Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs. The pair recently reunited for Ballyturk.

“It’s kind of a special relationship. But don’t say that to him. He gave me my first ever professional gig 20 years ago. And I just love his writing. I’ve just read the David Bowie musical that he’s doing in New York. It’s him at the peak of his powers.”

Murphy will be back in period costume early next year for Ben Wheatley's 1970s-set crime thriller Free Fire, and again, as a Czech soldier attempting to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague, in the second World War drama Anthropoid.

It’s a coincidence, he says. “I have zero strategy. For any of this. I just like doing good work. All I know is the sort of work that I don’t like and don’t want to do. And the longer you go on, the more people realise, ‘he’s not going to do that’. So that makes it easier to find the good stuff.”

Meanwhile, at a smaller screen near you, the same actor will get his cap on and razor blade out for the hit true life gangster series, Peaky Blinders. He's currently shooting a third series of the historical Birmingham saga.

Is he handy with a blade yet?

“No. They edit things very well,” laughs Murphy. “But what I like about that character and what I like about most of the protagonists in most of these kinds of TV shows – both here and across the water – is that they’re fallible.

“You think to yourself: ‘I don’t really want to spend 18 hours with some razor-wielding gangster from 1919.’ But you soon realise they’re as full of contradictions and complexities and foibles as all the rest of us. I love working on the canvas of long-form telly. You can explore a character because you have time that you don’t have in a play or a feature film. You can go really deep.”

We’d expect nothing less from Murphy. From the get-go, he has been “about the work” and not the blandishments of his chosen profession.

He does not have a personal publicist. He often attends premieres on his own. He cites the equally unpretentious Brendan Gleeson and Stephen Rea as role models.

How does it come to pass that an intensely private individual ends up in blockbusters on the scale of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises?

“I don’t know. It’s not that unusual to be an actor and a private person. It’s actually easier than you think. You do the required amount of promotional work, of course. But as for going out and entertaining people as myself? I find that intensely boring. Trying that myself or watching other people doing it.

“I’m not obstructive. I’ll do press and I’ll talk about the work. But a lot of this stuff is very fatuous and reductive. It’s completely disconnected from the work and I can’t be doing with it.”

It could be worse, he notes: he could be a woman: “I think women have it much tougher in this industry. In every respect. And they’re required to do far more reductive nonsense by way of promotion. I don’t know. Everything is so dumbed down. And it’s getting worse and worse.”

Unsurprisingly, he has never lived in Hollywood, preferring Kilburn and, lately, Dublin: Murphy, and his artist wife Yvonne McGuinness, moved back to Ireland with their two sons earlier this year.

“We just moved back before the [Marriage Equality] referendum. We were in London for 14 years. And before the result we were genuinely worried. Have we just made a terrible mistake? Thankfully it worked out. It was the right time to come home: an important time to come home.”

- In the Heart of the Sea opens December 26th