Sensitive actor Cillian Murphy has no time for showbiz blarney.

Cillian Murphy can't stand being hyped as the latest Irish screen stud. "It's basically lazy journalism if they say [I'm] the new Colin Farrell," he says. "This thing about heat, it's all just hot air." Murphy, 27, is best known from last summer's hit zombie horror film 28 Days Later... He now has a lead role alongside Farrell in the Irish comedy-drama Intermission, which opens on Friday.

He claims to be stunned that his long-lashed blue eyes have inspired Internet fan sites. His role models are Philip Seymour Hoffman and Billy Crudup—actors who concentrate on work, not on an image.

"I would hate to ever be considered a personality. When people go to the theater or to the cinema, they shouldn't have any preconceived notions of you as a person," he says.

For Murphy (his first name is pronounced Kill-ian), acting is an accidental passion—he really wanted to be a rock guitarist and still plays in a band. He made his stage debut at 20 in a play called Disco Pigs while halfheartedly studying law at the University of Cork. It was a hit at the Edinburgh Festival and transferred to London's West End.

"It was a baptism of fire," says Murphy, who remains insecure about never having trained at drama school. "To this day I still feel like a bit of an interloper to this whole game, but it's becoming less and less of an issue. I think instincts are something that's in your DNA, and I rely on that."

He must be doing something right. His performances in the lead role of Christy in J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre have earned raves; the run ends Saturday.

Murphy's character in Intermission, a shelf-stacker in a Dublin supermarket, breaks off with his girlfriend (Kelly Macdonald) because he's not sure she really loves him. He's then persuaded by Farrell's sociopathic thief to help him rob the bank managed by her new boyfriend.

Can't face troubles

"He represents something that's symptomatic in a lot of males, and that is inarticulateness in matters of the heart," Murphy says of his character. Irish guys in particular, he says, "are more likely to go out and drink seven pints of lager and talk about football" rather than discuss their troubles.

Murphy's career has been boosted by 28 Days Later...'s American success. "There's something I love about Hollywood in that openly cynical way they will say, 'If the film hadn't made a lot of money, you [wouldn't] be sitting in this office,'" Murphy reports. "They're very cut-and-dried about it. At least you know where you stand."

After playing small roles in Cold Mountain (as a kindhearted Union soldier) and Girl With a Pearl Earring (as Scarlett Johansson's butcher-boy suitor), Murphy screen-tested for director Christopher Nolan for the title role in summer 2005's Batman Begins. The part went to Christian Bale, but Nolan chose Murphy to play Dr. Jonathan Crane, alias Scarecrow.

"I never really saw myself as Batman material, but it was very nice to be offered the other role. If anyone's going to reinvent the franchise, it'll be Chris Nolan," Murphy says of the Memento director. Details of the project are closely guarded, but he expects Nolan to focus on the dark side of the comic-book saga.

Murphy lives in London with his girlfriend, an artist, and says he doesn't expect to be sunning himself by a Hollywood swimming pool anytime soon. If he goes anywhere, he says, it will be to New York, "my favorite city in the world. I'd love to do a show on Broadway."