Автор: Karen Butler

Cillian Murphy reunites with Boyle for Sunshine

Popular Irish actor, Cillian Murphy, returns to the action film genre this month with Sunshine, an intelligent sci-fi thriller from Danny Boyle, the director who helped launch Murphy's career with the 2002 hit "28 Days Later...

"I was a young actor when I did 28 Days Later... and I'd never worked with an established director, really," Murphy recently told reporters in New York.

"It was a watershed movie for me because it was the first movie of mine that people actually went to see. It opened doors, that's a given. I think I learned a great deal off Danny making that film, then I went away and worked on different parts and different directors and roles, and I hope I came back a moderately better actor and was abit more mature and more confident and was able to bring that to the table with Danny," explained the 31-year-old Douglas, Co. Cork native.

"There's a shorthand, and fundamentally a trust. Danny demands a lot from his actors. He wants them to go that final percent. I think he knows he can get that from me and I'm willing to go there for him. It was nice to go back with a proper budget, as well, because 28 Days Later... was done very cheaply."

A serious sci-fi picture that is more psychological thriller than disaster movie, Sunshine takes place 50 years in the future when the Earth is frozen in a solar winter. A team of scientists is lauched into space on the Icarus II, charged with the task of re-igniting the dying Sun by creating another Bib Bang, thereby saving all life forms that depend on its rays. Murphy plays physicist Robert Capa on a team that also includes Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, and Troy Garity.

"[Capa] is in charge of the payload, which means he has a lot of responsibility," Murphy said in a video diary on the film's Web site. "I hung out with the physicists and asked questions about the end of the world and meaning of life."

He also admits learning the scientific realities of the film got him to thinking a bit.

"The sun is going to die; it is not science fiction," he said. "The sun is going to die in the future and do we stand in the way of nature or God? Or do we control destiny to a degree."

The star of Irish films like, Intermission, Breakfast on Pluto, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley and the Hollywood hits, Batman Begins, Red Eye, and Cold Mountain, says his latest film offered him some interesting new challenges.

"I hadn't done really any of that [blue-screen work] before, but the acting was always the primary concern. Special effects were always secondary to that. It was more dropping in backgrounds or dropping in the sun or the ship traveling through space, it wasn't like you were acting to a dot [where some computer-animatied creature would be added in later," he told the Irish Echo in a separate phone interview.

"It was very tough. It was long and it could be quite tricky technically and it can require a lot of waiting around, whereas with The Wind That Shakes The Barley, there was no waiting around it. I enjoyed it and it's kind of a specific skill, which the more you do it, the better you get at it, I suppose."

Despite the opportunity to work with Boyle again, Murphy insists he wouldn't have signed on to this project if Alex Garland's writing hadn't been so good.

"I always start with the script," he confided. "It was just a phenomenal script and then the idea of re-collaborating with Danny was very appealing."

Even if the film turns out to be a huge box-office success, Murphy says he has no plans to relocate with his wife and toddler son to Los Angeles any time soon.

"I like living in London because I'm close to home, but I'm also a little removed. Most films nowadays get cast out of London, New York, and Los Angeles simultaneously and I'm European and I need to live in Europe; it just wouldn't fit my sensibilities living in America."

So, what does Murphy think of how his homeland has changed in recent years?

"When an economny grows that fast, there are always going to be problems and those are self-evident, but Ireland is a very modern, progressive nation now and that is encouraging."

Sunshine is set open in the United States July 20.