Sexy newcomer Cillian Murphy has Irish charm to spare—and the brains and talent to go global.

Cillian Murphy's voice could give a nun the flutters. Direct from County Cork, it's an earthy, ear-nibbling brogue that turns theater into tee-a-turr, movies into fillums, and a listener's knees to jelly. Now living in London, he says, "An actor shouldn't be limited by where is comes from." Having played a British bike messenger in the sci-fi-hit 28 Days Later..., Murphy appears this winter as a Southern vigilante (sic) in the Civil War-set Cold Mountain and a seventeenth-century Dutch butcher—Scarlett Johansson's fiancé—in The Girl With a Pearl Earring. Americans won't hear his native accent until the Irish film Intermission opens here next year, with Murphy and Colin Farrell playing a pair of very petty criminals ("Colin's higher up the ladder in pettiness," he deadpans).
The 27-year-old (whose name is pronounced Kill-E-an) has the looks of a Hollywood dreamboat and the brains and talent to be more. His conversation is peppered with cut-to-the-chase observations about everything from Morgan Freeman ("He's got a natural gravitas") to Pearl Earring's source novel ("so economically written"). The Coen brothers are the American filmmakers he most wants to work with. Determined to do a play a year, he just knocked off Chekhov's The Seagull and next plays the lead—"kind of the Irish Hamlet"—in Synge's Playboy of the Western World. With a nod to his school teacher family, the onetime law student says he's "the only actor in a long line of pedagogues." Are they proud of him? Murphy starts to joke, then, sounding shy, says, "Yes, I think they are."