Автор: Ethan Sacks

Irish actor Cillian Murphy's latest film brings him home

Only moments before he had to pull the trigger, Cillian Murphy was shaken to learn that he had to execute a young man he had befriended during a boot camp designed to turn actors into passable Irish partisans for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, opening Friday.

It's a pivotal scene in which his character, Damien, a young Irish doctor lured into the rebellion against the British Army in the early 1920s, shoots a childhood friend.

Sure, actor John Crean wasn't actually harmed. But British director Ken Loach had guerrilla tactics of his own for the film and wanted the 30-year-old Murphy to be as uncomfortable as his character. To stoke performances, he kept the cast close-knit, filmed in sequence and revealed parts of the script only just before shooting.

"We didn't know right up until the day who was going to have to shoot him—if he was going to get executed," Murphy said. "When he did, it was a hugely difficult moment for me personally as an individual, [as well as] for the character.

"You're still an actor, but it was very, very tough that day."

"His instinct is dead right," said Loach, still marveling at the on-screen results. "He has to shoot a young man, and he wouldn't look at him. He just drove through it—couldn't bear to stop to think."

Set and shot in County Cork, Ireland, where Murphy grew up, the winner of the 2006 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival tells of the division—epitomized by Damien and his brother Teddy (Padraic [sic] Delaney)—over the treaty that hewed Ireland in two.

"It meant a lot to me, cause it's in my DNA, that's where I'm from, it's who I am," said Murphy, whose second cousin was killed at age 17 by the notorious British "Black and Tans."

It may be the most personal performance yet for the budding actor—known for both his versatility and his luminous, azure eyes—who dropped law studies at University College Cork in 1996 to tour in a production of the play Disco Pigs.

In 2005 alone, Murphy played a transvestite searching for his birth mother in Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto and a conniving sociopath in both Wes Craven's Red Eye and Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins—he was "second villain" Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka the Scarecrow, in that Caped Crusader reboot . His breakthrough role was as a beleaguered survivor of a zombie plague in director Danny Boyle's horror hit 28 Days Later… (2002).

This summer, Murphy will be the center of Sunshine, about a small crew manning a spaceship en route to reignite the dying sun before Earth freezes over. The "speculative sci-fi" film, also starring Chris Evans and Michelle Yeoh, reunites Murphy with Boyle.

"I finished The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and then I had a weekend off, and then I was in space with Danny Boyle," Murphy said. "And I love that about this business ... you can find yourself in the fields of Cork shooting the British and the next thing you're in a spaceship heading towards the sun."

He doesn't know, however, what trajectory his career will take next. After taking eight months off to spend time with his first child, Malachy, now a year old, and a stint on the London stage, Murphy is eager to get back in front of the cameras.

"I want to do this job for however long I exist on this planet," Murphy said. "I have a lot more to learn. And I have a lot more to prove."