Автор: Alistair Harkness

Read any interview with Cillian Murphy and the chances are it will rhapsodise about his "piercing blue eyes", a feature that has seen the 30-year-old Irish actor likened to fellow countryman Peter O'Toole. It's an understandable impulse. On screen Murphy can be an electric presence; the kind of actor who can come alive in a heartbeat and completely alter an audience's perception of him. He could be about to romance the girl next door; he could be about to rip her head off.

In person, it's a different matter. Those eyes, deep blue as they are, don't do much piercing, and while he may have cheekbones to rival Johnny Depp's, the only thing that betrays his status as a successful, Golden Globe-nominated actor is the fact that he's sitting in a suite in London's Dorchester hotel, picking at a platter of fresh fruit. Slight of frame, casually dressed and with a tendency to hide behind his longish brown hair, he's a fairly unassuming movie star, the kind who downplays hype and any notions of having clout within the industry.

His new film is a case in point. He's here to talk about Sunshine, which reunites him with Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, and Andrew Macdonald, the creative team behind the low-budget zombie horror film 28 Days Later... It was the unexpected success of that film that put Murphy on the Hollywood radar four years ago. He followed it up with a supporting role in Cold Mountain, before breaking into the big time playing the Scarecrow in Batman Begins, then quickly scoring another box-office hit with Wes Craven's enjoyably trashy horror film, Red Eye. It would seem fair to suggest that his increased profile might have helped get Sunshine off the ground, but Murphy isn't having any of it. "Danny can cast whoever the hell he wants in a film," he says, modestly. But surely, for the studio, having one of the stars of Batman can't have hurt? "I suppose not, no," he says, sounding as if this calculation has never crossed his mind before.

Given his career ascent, it seems appropriate that he's re-teamed with Boyle on a film that's significantly larger in budget and scale than 28 Days Later... Marking Boyle's first foray into science-fiction, Sunshine revolves around a last-hope mission to save the Earth from an irreversible ice age. The sun is dying and plans are afoot to launch a nuclear payload the size of Manhattan into Earth's nearest star, effectively giving it an atomic jump-start. Set 60 years in the future and entirely aboard a space ship nearing the end of its 16-month mission, it's a dazzling, effects-heavy film, that achieves a good balance between the B-movie thrills of Alien and the more psychological underpinnings of serious sci-fi efforts such as Solaris and 2001. It also sees Murphy perfectly cast as a reluctant hero. He plays Capa, the physicist who designed the bomb that the eight-person crew of the appropriately named Icarus II are transporting.

"He's quite a silent character at the beginning of the movie," Murphy explains. "He's there, but he's kind of at a remove from the group. Everyone else is an astronaut, whereas Capa is a scientist. He has this huge responsibility; he's the only one who knows how this bomb works. That has an effect on his demeanour and his dynamic within the group. A lot of the characters I've played have been very much on the front foot so I liked that Capa was on the back foot."

To get to grips with the science part of the film—or at least, help him seem convincing as a scientist—Murphy spent a lot of time with Brian Cox, professor of physics at Manchester University—not the Scottish actor who starred opposite him in Red Eye. Cox took him to the CERN Institute in Geneva to learn some of the secrets of the universe.

"That was pretty far out," says Murphy. "For me it's totally counter-intuitive. You just can't grasp it, but it was actually more important to try and get inside the head of someone who is dealing with all these profound thoughts all the time. What does that do to you? That's really what fed into Capa."

He got to do fun stuff too. Boyle made Murphy and the rest of the international cast—which includes Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh and Fantastic 4 star Chris Evans—live together in student digs for two weeks to help them get into the siege mentality that goes with the territory on a long-haul space flight. Then there was scuba-diving, riding the BA flight simulator at Heathrow and—best of all—the chance to experience zero gravity. "That was weird and scary and nauseating all at once," recalls Murphy. "You get taken up in a light aircraft and then just drop very quickly."

Murphy does seem to enjoy his work. When he auditioned for Batman Begins he got to try on the Batsuit, and, after being cast as the Scarecrow, the film's frankly terrifying villain, he got a real kick out of seeing the batmobile and getting to fight Christian Bale's Caped Crusader. "I wish my ten-year-old self could have seen me," he laughs. Making Batman didn't feel like an anomaly for him either; rather, it was a chance to work with the film's director, Christopher Nolan, who made it seem as if they were making a small movie. It was only when Murphy attended one of the premieres, he says, that he thought, "Jesus! This is big." By that point, though, he'd already played a transvestite in Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto (for which he was later nominated for a Golden Globe award) and was well into filming Ken Loach's Cannes-fêted IRA drama, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, so there was never much chance of letting Batman's hype overwhelm him.

Working with Loach was a perception-changing experience. "I think he just shines a light on all the nonsense and hot air that surrounds the filmmaking business," Murphy says. "Ken just gets down and does it. Shoots everything chronologically. There's no excess. Excess surrounds everything we do generally, but for him it was more about instinct."

The same could be said for Murphy. Other young actors might have capitalised on Batman by racking up a string of blockbusters, but Murphy's not interested in accepting everything he's offered. "Success doesn't equal employment," he says. "I think for me it's the quality of the work, not how often you work. I'm quite choosy. Good scripts come up very infrequently, really, and I'm quite happy to hang around at home in between."