Автор: Tony Phillips

Cillian Murphy proves 'Breakfast' can be downright chilly.

"Come on," the rising Irish star asks, "do I look like a fucking Batman?"

OK, now. I would have settled for a simple, "No, I didn't read for the role of Batman." But then I'm not a film actor with the summer blockbusters Batman Begins and Red Eye under my belt on the verge of broaching the stratosphere. I'm just a journalist here to make sure Cillian Murphy's Breakfast on Pluto junket experience is as close to torture as possible. Or so it would seem by the wrong-side-of-the-bed routine he's pulling for the New York press corps assembled.

Don't get me wrong, he's interesting to look at. I could, in fact, spend the entirety of our allotted 20 minutes just staring at his face, which never really made sense to me until I saw him in drag. I'm not even averse to the Irish swagger. Collin Ferrell [sic] has practically made "feckin'" sound charming. But Ferrell[sic], along with drag queen "Kitten" who Murphy portrays in this film, both abhor anything "too serious." Not so Cillian Murphy.

Of course, the rumors percolating through these events like so much coffee have already addressed the irony of a film with the odd title Breakfast on Pluto lacking a proper breakfast buffet and the fact that Murphy has turned up to promote a film he spends almost the entirety of in drag in a full face of makeup.

Maybe not a full face, but he's definitely working that old lip-gloss on the upper eyelids trick. Someone mentions he's shot some TV interviews earlier in the morning. Maybe TV is short for Teen Vogue, but damn it, if someone looks as good as Cillian Murphy does in drag for the more than two-hours of "Breakfast on Pluto," why stop at some sheen around the brow bone? I doubt I'd ever wear jeans again.

But then there he is, in battered Levis and a navy Izod flashing that brand-new wedding ring. And about as eager to talk about doing a film in drag as Bush's latest pick for Supreme Court justice.

"It's less salient than you would imagine," is how Murphy describes his on-screen gender transformation. "It's only at the very end that Kitten is in the full regalia where she returns home."

Breakfast on Pluto director Neil Jordan has already begged off on his star's genesis, claiming to have cast Murphy without ever seeing the actor in costume. "It wasn't important that he was a good-looking woman," Jordan explains. "What was important was that he was somebody that wanted to look like a beautiful woman." But then Jordan already has his Oscar for the 1992 gender fuck The Crying Game.

"I wanted to be feminine rather than effeminate," Murphy says. "It's easy to do the campy, queenie thing. But to be a feminine character, that's what I wanted to achieve." So after he breezed into the role? "London clubs, beautiful people" is Murphy's take on research. "And they were amazing to me. You realize why they're so quick and acerbic. You get shouted out on the street. But that was easy to me. I knew I could do the dressing up thing and the looking pretty thing. It was trying to find the soul of the character—Kitten's goodness. She's relentlessly herself."

And then Murphy's on to an interesting parallel between him and his muse, Kitten, perhaps the reason he's so cranky this morning. "You get cat-calls when you're an actor too," he explains. "When I saw the movie, that part of it became less of a thing."

Then he lobs perhaps the most ridiculous question of the morning, in full earshot of no less than half a dozen publicists swarming around him, one whose sole duty seems to be proper Celtic instructions for pronouncing his first name. "Do you plan your career?" he asks. "I mean, nobody does. Nobody sits around and says on this day I will conquer this and that will allow us to conquer this. I just try and do good roles."

As he brings up his first breakout role in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later..., a director he's shooting for currently, I ask which was more difficult: his nude scene in that film or Kitten in what he calls "full-on gear"? I get a quick lecture on gratuity, and then we're done.

But just for the record, his name is pronounced "Kill-ian." It's a hard "c."