Автор: Susan King

Cillian Murphy's gender-bending turn in Neil Jordan's film comes after a tangle with the young Batman.

Irish actor Cillian Murphy is the anti-Colin Farrell. Though Murphy's countryman may have a higher profile in movies, Farrell's bad-boy antics have often overshadowed his thespian abilities.

That hasn't been the case with the 29-year-old Murphy, who's avoided the tabloids while racking up positive notices in a year that's included turns as a villain in Christopher Nolan's Batman Returns (sic), as a psychopath in Wes Craven's thriller Red Eye, and as the androgynous hero of the biggest film of his young career, Breakfast on Pluto.

In person, Murphy is polite and well spoken. Sweet. He's fine-boned, with expressive blue eyes and a perfect profile. He describes his wife as "beautiful" and beams when he talks about his first child, Malachy, born just two weeks earlier. "He's wee," Murphy says with a smile.

"The baby is most important," he says, adding that he plans to take time off to get to know his firstborn. "I am dealing with feeding and changing nappies at the moment."

Breakfast on Pluto, directed by Neil Jordan of The Crying Game, was co-written by Jordan and Patrick McCabe based on the latter's novel. Murphy auditioned four years ago for the role of "Kitten" Braden, a foundling who embarks on a series of adventures a la "Candide." Kitten becomes a rock singer, is accused of working with the Irish Republican Army and does turns as a magician's assistant, a popular attraction at a peepshow, and even a character in an amusement park.

"Kitten is not trying to fool anybody," Murphy said during a 12-hour stay in Los Angeles for the Pluto premiere at the American Film Institute Fest.

"She doesn't try to pass herself off as a girl at any point. She wants to look pretty and beautiful and wear flowery clothes and identifies with the feminine side of herself. Ultimately, she considers herself a lady."

Jordan found Murphy to be one of those "great actors who can do something physical to themselves and transform themselves. He could totally immerse himself in that role."

Murphy says the key to playing Kitten was to capture her soul—to create her from the inside out.

"I knew I could do the physical stuff," he says. "You are lit well, and you have a costume designer so you can look pretty. But if people are going to invest in this character, they need to invest emotionally."

"With other characters, you can put on a watch or a jacket and say, 'Bang, this is it.' With Red Eye, when I put on the suit, I saw him."

With Kitten, "I didn't want the character to be at all butch. I wanted him to be as feminine as possible, obviously."

Jordan, says Murphy, "very smartly made the decision that Kitten shouldn't smoke."

The reason? It would ruin the illusion, as audiences would see Murphy's masculine hands every time he took a drag on the cigarette.

"The curly hair gave him a soft frame to the face," Murphy says. "I used the book as a source material a lot. Pat McCabe did a reading of the book, so I listened to that. I am from Cork, which is south, and Pat is from the northern border of Ireland, and there is a definite distinction to the accent."

Murphy decided not to make Kitten's voice aggressive or assertive—"the thing you can get with drag queens. I wanted it to be much more alluring and subtle. As a result I wanted the voice to be more purry—kitten-like."

He avoided asking his wife for advice about playing the part. "That would have been too close, to use my wife as an example," Murphy says. "I just traveled on the tube in London or looked at women and observed them. Women rarely stand with their hands by their side. They are always doing something with their hands. Neil did suggest investing in a lot of grooming products, which my wife and I did together, to adjust your brain a little bit more to the softer, nicer things in life."

Murphy says Pluto isn't about Kitten's loss of innocence but about how she maintains her innocence throughout her adventures. "Mostly in a narrative, the protagonist goes on a very steep arc from A to Zed, and though she changes in increments, for the most part, other people are changing around her. She is making the change happen in all the people that she meets. There is no ulterior motive to the character."

In Batman, Murphy found his way into a role that was the temperamental inverse of Kitten. He initially auditioned for the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman for the latest entry in the series, a part that eventually went to Christian Bale.

"Christian was the obvious choice," Murphy said. "I did my best, but I never considered myself to be 'Batman' material."