Автор: John Walsh
 
Meet the Action Hero Who Looks on the Verge of Tears
Cillian Murphy has eyes that pierce to your very soul, lips that Angelina would be proud of—and as for those cheekbones... But they want him to play action heroes? John Walsh is entranced.
"I think there's such a thing," confides Cillian Murphy, "as a performance gene. If it's in your DNA it needs to come out. For me it originally came out through music, then segued into acting and came out through there. I always needed to get up and perform."
It's a slightly gross thought, to have a performance gene burst out of you one day, like the baby alien emerging through John Hurt's chest in Alien, but Murphy's talent does rather leap from the screen. His startling blue eyes shine with an eerie radiance; they seem to emit beams, as the metaphysical poets used to believe lovers' eyes radiated at each other. He's an actor of violently contrasting emotions. He does quiet and reflective, he does noisy and confrontational, he does fast, he does slow, he does physical, he does spiritual (boy, does he do spiritual). And whatever he does, the camera locks on to his face and won't let go. He's a screen paradox: an action hero who often looks as though he's on the verge of tears; a leading man with a physiognomy of elegant femininity. Casting directors keep offering him roles that require him to fight and kill people, while his face registers pained resignation and a reluctance to do anything more violent than nibble his fingernails. He was blown up in The Trench, pursued by zombies in 28 Days Later... and enlisted in the IRA in The Wind That Shakes the Barley. He took on the caped crusader as the Scarecrow in Batman Begins and intimidated Rachel McAdams in Red Eye. Producers queue up like drill sergeants to make a man of him.
His new film Sunshine opens next month. Remember the Richard Lester/Peter Sellers short entitled The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film? Well Sunshine is The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Staring In Amazement At the Sun film. Murphy is a whizz at all these activities. Danny (Trainspotting) Boyle's new £20m movie, scripted by Alex Garland, is an ambitious SF thriller about a long-haul voyage to the sun 50 years from now. The sun is dying, life on Earth is threatened, and the unfortunately named Icarus II is heading towards the formerly boiling spheroid to launch at its core a massive bomb to re-ignite its faltering gases and thereby re-light the world. The eight astronauts have been thrown together for ages, tempers are fraying, there's a question mark about the availability of oxygen, and then they get a signal from the Icarus I proto-ship, which disappeared seven years earlier...
Murphy plays Capa, the mission's physicist, the guy who can explain the hard science to the others. Some aeons removed from anyone's idea of a space boffin (cool, logical, Spocky), Capa is a brooding, nervy figure who gets into fights, has horrible dreams and spends half the film running through exploding corridors, falling through space or fighting off a nasty villain.
"Yeah it was pretty gruelling," he admits, "but it's a dream to be making a film with someone like Danny Boyle. If you get a few bumps and bruises, that's nothing to complain about. And the most exhausting element wasn't the fight scenes, it was the helmet. The problem with a space suit is, when the visor comes down you lock the audience out. So Danny and the director of photography, Alwin Kuchler, devised a camera built into the helmet, a big wide-angle rig, a brilliant device but a beast of a thing to carry. It weighed a ton. The effort required to walk in it was unbelievable. Most of the effort and sweat and exhaustion you see, that's real. We filmed some of it in August, and there were stunt men fainting from exhaustion."
Just as knackering, by the sound of it, was the rehearsal regimen Boyle imposed on his eight actors. To accustom them to the feeling of living in cramped intimacy, he had them live together in a student dormitory, sleeping in single beds, cooking for each other, constantly rubbing shoulders, like squatters, as if the words "trailer" and "room service" hadn't been invented. Boyle has been telling the press that the actors were unhappy about their treatment. "I am not an unpleasant person," he told Empire, "but you have to be merciless."
Murphy, a fiercely loyal lieutenant, will have none of it. "It was great. Luckily they were a lovely bunch of people, and we just got on with it. We cooked and drank and sang. It's hard to act as if you've known people for 18 months, that you've lived with them and bumped into them and stood beside them while they stink - so to have lived it for two weeks was something special. Danny was keen that, in our first communal dinner in the movie, there should be a sense that these people have had hundreds of dinners like it, evening after evening."
It's a claustrophobic film, with a sweaty, cooped-up, paranoid atmosphere (in the middle of the vastness of the galaxy) accentuated by lots of close-ups. We see even more of the planes and ridges, pools and caverns of Murphy's face than we saw in 28 Days Later... when his lean, nervy fizzog was in almost every scene. How do you maintain a pitch of intensity, an embodiment of dread, for 110 minutes?
"At the start of the shoot, Danny sent us all a picture of a bullfighter, an incredible photograph. The bullfighter has this look in his eye as the bull approaches. 'That intensity,' Danny said. 'That's what I'm looking for.' And he's so driven, and demands so much from himself, all the actors feel compelled to give it right back." With two- or three-hour gaps between set-ups, "you have to find ways to adrenalise yourself"—which in his case means working out in the gym and playing "pretty intense" rock music.
As part of his research, he spent time with Brian Cox, a leading astrophysicist. Surely you don't need a knowledge of physics to play a physicist? "For us lay people, it's hard to grasp these ideas, that everything emerged from the Big Bang and nobody knows why, or what 95 per cent of the universe is made of. I was never going to understand that. When I talked to Brian, I wanted to get a brief glimpse inside his head and imagine what it means to be dealing with all these massive profound thoughts all the time, and how it affects your interaction with other people." He went to Geneva to visit Cox's workplace. "They're building this particle accelerator, which is 25 km long and they're going to smash protons together to create the conditions of the Big Bang. But all I could do with these guys was hang out with them and ask really idiotic questions over and over..."
Murphy was brought up a Catholic in Ireland; he kept the faith until he discovered Darwinism. Born 30 years ago in Co. Cork, he's the scion of a teaching dynasty. His father was a schools inspector, then a civil servant at the Irish Department of Education. His mother's a French teacher. His grandfather and aunts and uncles were all teachers. At the Presentation Brothers College, "I was good academically, but I wasn't very interested in sport and that ruled out a whole part of my education. I was keen on music and the arts." He and his friends formed a band called The Sons of Mr Greengenes—a line from a Frank Zappa song—and played at school concerts, Cillian on guitar. "It was jazz-rock, with lots of long solos. We were good players but it was never commercial. It didn't transfer to records." At Cork University he took up drama, acted in student productions, and, at 19, appeared on the public stage in Enda Walsh's play Disco Pigs. After the play went on tour, Murphy realised he'd found his metier. He left university and hit the boards.
He might have stayed stage-bound, were it not for a teenage epiphany that stayed with him. "I remember watching a movie called Scarecrow when I was about 14 or 15. It's directed by Jerry Schatzberg, and there's a scene in which Al Pacino has a breakdown in a public fountain. I was so moved by it. I remember thinking, my God, a screen performance can have this effect on me, and make me feel this way, so emotionally raw..."
It was five years before the performance gene emerged, and another four before he turned up, at 23, in The Trench, playing an Irish soldier. "I'd done one little movie in the States and came back and auditioned for William [Boyd, the novelist who wrote and directed the film]. I didn't get the part, but then he wrote in a little part specially for me." He smiled a wry smile. "I get blown up half an hour into the movie, while I'm carrying this stew back from the reserve trenches and a bomb lands and I'm turned into stew myself." Among other early sightings of future stars in that movie was Daniel Craig. "I remember we were all terrified of him on set. He was playing a captain or a general, a ferocious Northern character, and I think he stayed in character a lot." Have they met more recently? "I've seen him many times since then and he's been very sweet. And I thought he was immense as James Bond."
Despite his regular avowals of admiration for Boyle and the Sunshine team, Murphy is far from being a luvvie. Though it's pretty clear that he is solid mates with the Irish acting mafia of Brendan Gleason (sic) (with whom he performed in 28 Days Later..., Breakfast on Pluto, and Cold Mountain), Colin Farrell and Gabriel Byrne, and has signed up to make a film with all of them, based on Flann O'Brien's surreal masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds, he won't divulge a word about their joint and separate social lives. He lives in London with his wife Yvonne McGuinness and their son Malachy, aged one.
"I've never equated success with employment," he says. "To me, success is the quality of the work, and I'm patient enough to wait for the next reasonably good script to arrive, because they're so rare. There's 100 bad scripts for every one that's any good. I'm OK with that, with sitting round the house for three or four months. I have a young son, I spend time playing with him and my wife, I read a lot, I run, I go to gigs." A nice quiet private life, it seems, for an action-packed visionary.
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