Ciara Dwyer met Cillian Murphy, an actor labelled "the next best thing", and found a man possessed of film-star quality who, surprisingly, lives up to all the hype.

Cillian Murphy has been deemed hot property: the one to watch. For once, the hype is spot-on. The 25-year-old Corkonian's talent befits more than the next-best-thing spreads. He has film-star quality, a slender face and eyes that would suck you in. But Cillian also has what every astute actor would kill for: raw talent.
With film you can retake a scene, but on stage there is no room for faking. Before we get on to the spate of films in which Cillian stars, On the Edge and Disco Pigs, to name but two, let us talk about Cillian the stage actor. The theatre was where he began.
Growing up in Cork, Cillian had been a fan of Corcadorca theatre company's work.
"When I was in fourth year in school, Pat Tiernan (sic) from Corcadorca did a drama workshop with us and I enjoyed it. Then I used to go to see their shows. They'd do things like A Clockwork Orange in Sir Henry's nightclub. They'd get young people to go along by doing plays in nightclubs and site-specific stuff. Recently, they did A Midsummer Night's Dream in the church park and promenade theatre outside. I owe it to Corcadorca for getting me into theatre."
When Cillian heard that Corcadorca was holding auditions for Disco Pigs, he went along.
Dubliner Enda Walsh had moved to Cork and had written a play which was full of Cork-speak and a language all of its own. It was about a boy and girl Pig and Runt who were best friends. The play follows their experiences as they grow up.
Cillian got the part. He played Pig to Eileen Walsh's Runt. The play was unlike anything seen on Irish stages. First there was the language. Pig and Runt had developed a language of their own. It was the two of them against the world. Disco Pigs was a very physical play. There was lots of leaping and thudding and clubbing in it.
"We workshopped it and rehearsed it. We threw ourselves into it," says Cillian. "There was no acting in it, it was about just doing it. I think that's why it captured people's imagination. It went to Toronto and Budapest. It seemed to transcend the language barrier."
Disco Pigs has been made into a film, directed by Kirsten Sheridan, which will open the Cork Film Festival on October 7.
But when Cillian was in Enda Walsh's play, he still hadn't decided that acting was the career for him.
"I didn't see myself as an actor. I was just doing this during my summer holidays from college. So I had no reason to be nervous. It was only a three-week run in the Triskel. We had no idea that it was going to be as successful as it was."
Cillian had been doing a law degree in UCC. He dropped out of the course to go on tour with Disco Pigs, but later he resumed his studies only to discover that law was not for him. The Murphy parents were not exactly over the moon with their son leaving college. Cillian's father is a school inspector (a cigire) and his mother is a French teacher.
Since then, Cillian has been extremely lucky and has clocked up several interesting roles. There was his part as the younger brother in John Murphy's The Country Boy; he is stuck on the family farm, but when his older brother visits from the States, full of big talk, he wants to join him to escape from the drudgery of dairy life. The great Peter Gowen played the big brother, who has to tell his sibling that all his talk is a sham. Garry Hynes directed the production. I saw it myself in the Civic Theatre in Tallaght and Cillian was powerful in it.
He also played Johnny Boyle in Hynes's production of Juno and the Paycock at the Gaiety.
"I feel very close to the theatre. I really want to continue to do it. I don't see myself, in any ways, as a film actor. The actors I admire are the ones who do a bit of both theatre and film. I got a great buzz from being in the Gaiety. There's much more of that instant rush off theatre than film."
But that is not to say that Cillian doesn't take film seriously. He had a small part in Sweety Barret (sic). He played the lead in a film called Sunburn, about a group of young Irish students living in Boston for the summer. And on the day I met him, he had flown over from London on one of his rare days off from shooting 28 Days Later..., a film directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) and written by Alex Garland (The Beach).
Cillian's latest film to hit our screens is called On the Edge. It is about a young lad Jonathan who, having failed to commit suicide, winds up in a psychiatric hospital.
"I thought the script dealt with a subject that was very topical. The suicide rate in Ireland is really ridiculous. It's 8,000 or 9,000 a year and 75 per cent of them are young men. The script dealt with the subject of mental illness with humour and intelligence. I thought my character was representative of a lot of young men in Ireland, who just don't have a lot of balance."
In many of the roles Murphy has played, he tends to be a bit wound up. I wonder is he like that in real life. Is that a character trait?
"No," he says softly. "I consider myself to be a very calm person."
Cillian may be hyped as a hot Irish actor, but while everyone else is losing the head, he, like Kipling, is keeping his.
"I'm learning all the time. I'm just trying to get better," he says humbly.
I will continue to watch his talent unfold. He will go far. And he will last. This is no hype, merely fact.