Автор: Karen Butler McCully

For quite some time now, Cillian Murphy has been widely regarded as one of Ireland's best-looking lads; after seeing Neil Jordan's gender-bending film, Breakfast on Pluto, many are sure to think he is one of her best-looking ladies, as well.

"Oh, thank you very much," the Cork-born actor replied to compliments on how lovely he appears in the film.

"That's the problem or the challenge with this character. It's easy to look pretty or glamorous in women's clothes, but if you don't invest in the character, then so what?"

Based on Patrick McCabe's critically acclaimed 1998 novel about a cross-dresser with a heart of gold, the movie's screenplay was co-written by McCabe and Jordan, the acclaimed Irish filmmaker who also brought McCabe's The Butcher Boy to the big screen in 1997.

In the new film, which begins in 1958 in the fictional town of Tyreelin, near the border with Northern Ireland, Murphy plays Patrick Braden, the illegitimate son of Father Bernard (Liam Neeson) and Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle,) a young housekeeper who bares a striking resemblance to South Pacific siren Mitzi Gaynor. When Eily drops the infant off on Father Bernard's doorstep one morning before heading off to London to start a new life, the surprised priest takes the boy to be raised by foster mother Ma Braden (Ruth McCabe) refusing for years to acknowledge him as his own.

Growing up in a bleak, loveless home, Patrick turns to his friends and fellow misfits—Charlie, Irwin, and Laurence—for companionship and support. As a teenager, Patrick discovers he is not like other boys as he loves to wear glam makeup and design flashy clothes. Irrepressibly optimistic and with absolutely no desire to fit in, the flamboyant Patrick, now going by the name of Kitten, continually draws the ire of the narrow-minded folks in his provincial town. Wanting more out of life, he sets off for London to search for his long-lost mom—and a place where he can just be himself.

It isn't long before Kitten makes the full transition to transvestite and falls in love with several men, all of whom betray her for one reason or another. As much as she scorns anything "serious, serious, serious," Kitten is forced to deal with the reality of fighting in her homeland when a lover hides guns in her caravan, one friend is killed by a car bomb, and another is murdered after falling out with some of his IRA comrades. Later, Kitten is even wrongfully accused of blowing up a London nightclub based on nothing but the fact that she is an Irish man dressed like a woman.

"It's one of those roles of a lifetime," the 29-year-old Batman Begins and Red Eye star told The Irish Echo in an interview Saturday before Breakfast on Pluto premiered as the centrepiece of the New York Film Festival.

"What makes it very different is the fact that, normally, characters start off as A and they turn into Z by the end of the movie, while Kitten, although she changes and grows, she's kind of relentlessly herself throughout the movie," Murphy explained. "She's a different thing and people are affected by her and people change around her rather than the character changing drastically."

A big fan of McCabe's book, Murphy said he did a screen test for Jordan about four years ago, but was then told the film adaptation had briefly been put on hold. The pair met again when Jordan produced the actor's 2003 film, Intermission.

"So, we were hanging out during the making of that and I kept asking him about Breakfast on Pluto," Murphy recalled. "Then [Alan Moloney], the producer of Intermission, who also produced Breakfast on Pluto, said, 'If you guys do it, give me three weeks and I'll get the money.' And he got the money in three weeks. He's a very good producer."

The director of The Crying Game and Michael Collins said he never thought of another actor after Murphy did his screen test, but admits he did have trepidation about making another film about transvestites or terrorism, or both.

"Cillian is one of the best actors around anywhere," the Sligo-born filmmaker noted. "I'd written this part and I'd tested Cillian and some other actors and the question in my mind was: 'Can this be delivered? Can anybody around do this? Play this rural Irish boy who expresses his femininity and goes on this big journey?' And Cillian gave this performance, which was great. It blew me away and then, because I was worried about making another film about political violence, I didn't come to it for a long time. Cillian eventually came to me and said, 'Look, are you going to make this before I'm too old? Please make it while I can still play it.'"

Asked how he knew he could pull off the extraordinary role, the handsome blue-eyed actor said, "I didn't, really, and that's the whole thing."

"That's the appeal," he emphasized. "I think that if you know you can do it, then there would be no challenge. There would be no draw."

Although most people are talking about his spectacular physical transformation for the role (sort of the opposite of what Charlize Theron did for Monster) Murphy said it was understanding and depicting Kitten's interior life, which ran the gamut of human emotions, that were the true trials for him as an actor.

"Finding the soul of the character was the real challenge," he confided. "I didn't want to make the character effeminate or affected. I wanted the character to be feminine. I didn't want to do a campy, queeny thing."

Jordan agreed they should show Kitten simply being herself, not trying to deceive anyone or even attract attention by donning women's clothing.

"The first thing I said was: 'I don't want La Cage Aux Folles. I don't want high camp going on here at all because it wasn't about that,'" the 55-year-old filmmaker remarked. "It was really about the inner soul of the character because the character was somebody who was just who they were ... So, even if Cillian had been all muscled up and looked a bit more like Vin Diesel, the character probably would have been the same."

Both Jordan and Murphy said they were pleased with McCabe's decision to radically adapt his text for the film, giving Kitten the happy ending she deserves.

"It's kind of a fairytale," Murphy said of the film. "And at the end she kind of creates this prototype nuclear family with [her friend] Charlie and her baby..."

"I think Neil wanted it to shift," he added. "So that you care for the character so much, hopefully, you want it to work out right."

Describing Breakfast on Pluto as a companion piece to The Butcher Boy, Murphy noted that both feature protagonists that are determined characters with their own realities.

"I think it's not a conscious thing," he observed, comparing how the characters of Francie and Kitten both seem to invent their own little worlds with different results. "I think it's just the way they're hard-wired ... Francie Brady was a dark, dark character where Kitten is a fundamentally good person. There's not a bad bone in his body."

Asked whether he thinks Kitten's strength and resilience are a façade or if she really is as optimistic as she seems, Murphy said he believes she employs a combination of both, but always has the best of intentions.

"I think there is a level of creating an alternative world to deal with the pain and the violence of her world," he offered. "But then some people have this thing that just has to come out. I don't think she dresses like that to shock. It's just because she has to. It's imperative that she dress that way. There is no agenda and I think that the outlook she has, perhaps, of, 'Serious, serious, serious.' I think she feigns ignorance or naiveté about what is going on in the North. I think she is completely aware. She dumps the IRA guns [in a lake]. She is completely aware of it going on, but she feigns this lack of understanding."

Although the film shows Murphy in various stages of drag starting from the days when he is a teen wearing mascara and a boy's school uniform that looks like it has been hit by a Be-Dazzler a few too many times to his appearance as a squaw in a rockabilly concert to his brief time as a streetwalker, Jordan never shows Kitten getting made up or doing his hair, thus allowing moviegoers to really forget they are watching a man dressed as a woman.

"She's not ever trying to fool anybody. Ever. It's not like The Crying Game, there's never any point of deception," he said.

Wearing the clothes and makeup helped the actor immensely when getting into character, though.

"We had a brilliant costume designer and we worked together in choosing costumes and it was very obvious which things worked and which things didn't," he recalled. "We did a lot of camera tests and some of it looked so bad. You can easily look bad in drag, no matter how svelte you are, you can still look bad and Neil was very clear that he wanted it to happen in increments; that it wasn't until the end that she was in full regalia."

Murphy also said he thinks the film can be seen as a parable of tolerance, since both the main story and the political backdrop indicate what can happen when people don't respect one another.

"I think acceptance is a big theme of the film," Murphy said. "And the need to be accepted and the need to be loved. The destination being to find her mom, it's the journey where all the interesting things happen. Ultimately, people change. She doesn't change, but people change around her and Liam Neeson's character does a complete turn-around and change of heart. It's wonderful to see a Catholic priest become the hero of the piece and Liam Neeson on-screen just evokes this amazing warmth and love and to be brought back into that is a very heartwarming thing."

Setting the film in 1970s-era Ireland and London also helped inform Kitten's story, he continued.

"I think the first reason [to set it then] is obviously the backdrop of the Troubles in the North and the second one being that there were better clothes then," Murphy laughed. "And people were messing with androgyny and David Bowie and Mick Jagger were all messing with that and also an openly gay or transvestite character back in the 1970s, in Ireland, would have been a much harder thing for people to take than they would be nowadays."