Автор: Esther McCarthy

Cillian Murphy breaks his silence and comes clean to Esther McCarthy about his private life, and experimenting with comedy

He's one of the hottest and most talented actors around, with Hollywood at his feet and top directors vying to work with him.

But as far as Cillian Murphy is concerned, family comes before even the most enticing movie role.

The Cork-born actor says he's just like any other new dad and wants to spend as much time as possible with his young wife, Yvonne, and 16-month-old baby boy, Malachy.

"It's definitely important from a practical point of view," he tells SWM when asked how fatherhood influences his work choices.

"You know, it's simple—I'm not happy when I go away from him and my wife. I want them to be with me, that's how it is. I want to be at home more than I'm away, and luckily this job gives me the freedom to do that to a degree."

So when Trainspotting director Danny Boyle presented 30-year-old Cillian with a great science-fiction script that involved filming a short commute from the family's London home, he went for it.

The result is Sunshine, a tense sci-fi thriller in which Murphy plays a physicist who heads a team on an arduous trip to the fading sun, in a bid to save it—and the human race—from extinction.

It's his second time working with Boyle, who catapulted the actor to international success with the excellent drama thriller, 28 Days Later…

"I love Danny's films, I have them in my DVD collection. So it was nice to go back and work with him after six years, doing other films with other directors and hopefully coming back as a more mature person, and with a bit more experience."

Boyle's unorthodox approach meant that Murphy also lived in close quarters with his costars before filming.

"We lived in student accommodation (sic) East London, for two weeks before shooting we all moved in together. Very few directors would ask you to do that and there are very few directors you'd do it for," he says.

But he also says it helped create the sense that the characters had spent months in confined quarters on a spacecraft together.

"You can act it, but to have lived it takes it to another level. You can't put your finger on what it does, but it changes the energy."

A self-confessed sci-fi fan, Cillian was also thrilled to get to experience zero gravity when researching the role.

"It's not the NASA Danny did where they fly way up. What we did was a light aircraft where you manufacture it by going up really, really high and very fast and then coming down. I don't know the physics of it," he smiles.

"It's very exhilarating but you also recognise that human beings aren't meant to experience it, if you know what I mean."

The role fed a fascination with science that made Cillian, who was always agnostic about God, become an atheist. "I felt like I needed to take a view on it," he says now.

"I was never religious and I recognise that faith and religion are very important to a lot of people. So it's not denigrating them. But from my own point of view it seemed like a more interesting take. It brought home to me how insignificant we are in the whole scheme of things and how were here for such a fleeting second."

It's been an incredible couple of years for Murphy. He originally studied law but developed a love of theatre after becoming involved in drama while at UCC.

Low-budget films were followed by roles as diverse as comic-book baddie The Scarecrow in Batman Begins, an eerie hostage taker in Red Eye, a canny transvestite in Breakfast on Pluto, and a freedom fighter in The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

He is still thrilled that the controversial latter film, made in his home county of Cork, found a huge audience. "Generations of families went to see it. My granny, who hadn't been to see a film since, I think, Titanic, went to see it. It touched a real chord."

Other movies are in the offing, including Watching the Detectives, a romantic comedy he filmed over one month in New York with Charlie's Angels star Lucy Liu.

Remembered most for his darker roles, Cillian says he welcomed the chance to play it for laughs: "It was a great, interesting little romantic comedy. It was a chance for me to goof around with Lucy in the summertime in New York.

"I really enjoyed it because I'd done a lot of exhausting, intense films. They're the kind of films I do love to watch, but it was nice to just go and have a bit of fun."

He also tells how he's in talks to play Keira Knightley's husband in The Best Time of Our Lives, a film about the poet Dylan Thomas, although nothing has been finalised.

And he confirms that he's one of several Irish actors—also rumoured to include Colin Farrell and Gabriel Byrne—who may team up for a project being planned by Brendan Gleeson.

"Brendan has written a script of the Flann O'Brien novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, and it's very, very good.

"A lot of people have said they'd be involved if he makes it and I hope he does. I'd work with Brendan on anything, he's just fantastic."