Автор: Andy Dougan

Star Cillian sparkles in Sunshine

When he was a boy Cillian Murphy used to dream about being a cowboy riding the range. To a small boy from Cork that seemed pretty cool but playing an astronaut would have come a close second.

"I loved all those magnificent films that are quite rightly described as classics," says the Irishman. "Movies like 2001, Solaris, Alien, and all of those."

I don't know that it has much to do with his viewing choices, but there is a slightly spacey quality to the 30-year-old Irishman, which is only accentuated by his piercing, unblinking, blue eyes and softly-spoken tone. He has the look, and I don't mean this unkindly, of someone who is not necessarily of this planet.

You might cast him in a science-fiction film but probably as an alien and not an astronaut. However, in Sunshine, which is already being hailed as a modern classic, Cillian is an astronaut and the hero of the tale.

He is one of eight crew members on what amounts to a suicide mission to plant a massive nuclear device in the heart of our decaying sun. The plan is to reignite its core and save the earth.

As always on films like this you hear of actors being sent off to boot camp to bond as an ensemble. They did indeed go off to "space camp" but Cillian says it was nowhere near as bad as some would have it.

"It's always good to exaggerate these things for you guys," he says smiling, "so we'll tell you we were in horrible dormitories with shared toilets. It wasn't that bad," he adds. "We all had single rooms."

Murphy has come a long way since he first worked with Sunshine director Danny Boyle in 28 Days Later… Prior to the zombie movie he had gone to Los Angeles and found people couldn't even pronounce his name.

"I went around to all these meetings and everybody called me 'Sillian'," he says with a look of resignation. His name is of course pronounced as if it were spelled with a 'K'.

"That all changed when 28 Days Later… became a big hit. Suddenly, they could all pronounce my name," he smiles.

And they have been pronouncing it in a string of hits, such as Red Eye and Batman Begins, as well as critically acclaimed films such as Breakfast on Pluto and The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

But even something like Batman Begins couldn't prepare him for the experience of working on Sunshine.

"I was on Batman Begins for two weeks out of a film that shot for a year," he says modestly. "But Christopher Nolan is like Danny Boyle in that it doesn't feel like a enormous film. It's all about the performance."

For Cillian and the rest of a cast that includes Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh and Rose Byrne, the experience was a bit like being a goalkeeper in a top football team, called into action only briefly.

"This was four months of intense filming," he explains. "The technical aspect was very hard. Danny was doing stuff that hadn't been done before so there was a lot of waiting around for us while they set up.

"To then be totally energised and have the adrenaline flowing, that's really hard to do when you've been sitting down for two hours. It really tests your concentration."

One of the biggest aids to his performance came from Brian Cox, not the grizzled veteran Scots actor but the rock star turned physicist—he played keyboards for D:Ream—who was the film's technical adviser.

Cillian explains that although there were a lot of effects in the film, it wasn't at the CGI level of looking at a ball on a stick, which would later be transformed into some fantastic creature.

"We had to act out our response to looking at the sun or some phenomenon in space," he explains. "When that happened we had so much information to draw on from Brian that we were able to immerse ourselves in it and give a convincing performance."