Автор: Colin Farrell  :))))))))))))))))

James Joyce once said that mistakes are portals of discovery, for Cillian Murphy, that could not be more true.

He may have literally revealed every inch of himself in his breakthrough movie, 28 Days Later... (2002), yet Cillian Murphy has managed to maintain a relatively private life behind the cameras. A former law student who quit school the day after seeing a play, the 29-year-old Irishman has been quietly eeking out an impressive body of work on-screen, buoyed by a casual charm that alternates between slithery-sinister (Red Eye, Batman Begins) and wide-eyed earnest (Intermission, 2003). Now, with his performance in Neil Jordan's captivating new film, Breakfast on Pluto, in which he plays gold-hearted transvestite Patrick "Kitten" Braden, who journeys from his small Irish village to London to seek out his long-lost birth mother amidst the terrible strife of the Irish Republican Army in the early '70s, Murphy adds his most flamboyant role yet to his ever-growing list of eccentrics.

Colin Farrell: It's 4 p.m. now in the Dominican Republic. Which is what time where you are, in London?

Cillian Murphy: Comin' up to 9.

CF: Are you workin'?

CM: I'm doing another Danny Boyle movie, actually. It's a sci-fi movie, set in a spaceship, and I play a physicist. Then stuff starts to go wrong, as it generally does on spaceships.

CF: Well, it wouldn't be drama if it all went swimmingly.

CM: There you go. They're trying to do a classy sci-fi movie, which hasn't been done in a long time. Not since Alien [1979], I guess.

CF: It's your second time workin' with Boyle.

CM: Yeah, it is. I think the reason people work with the same people again is not so much loyalty but because there's an understanding there, you know?

CF: Yeah, absolutely. There's a thing with anyone, whether it's an actor or a director or somebody in your office, where it takes a while for you to find some kind of groove or begin to understand each other. But that's just cut out the second time around. You just move straight into it.

CM: That's the thing. There's a trust and a shorthand, so it just makes it easier all around. I'm lovin' Boyle, man. It's also from the same writer who did 28 Days Later...

CF: Alex Garland?

CM: That's right, yeah.

CF: Ah, brilliant.

CM: Yeah, so it's Garland's freakin' screenplay. I'm lovin' it. It's just that I've done that kind of green-screen and wire work and all that stuff.

CF: It gets old fast, doesn't it?

CM: I just do a lot of crosswords, man. [laughs]

CF: That's something I've started to do on Miami Vice. There's this guy, Allen Weisinger, on this film. He's one of them fuckers that gets the New York Times crossword on Friday and has it done just before he finishes his coffee, you know? I can only do it by Monday.

CM: No, I'm not on that level, man. But you've got time on your hands, you know? There's so much time being spent setting up on these kinds of movies, so you do a lot of hanging around. It's a different type of acting, too, because when you come on you have to be totally honest.

CF: Yeah, you can't do it in halves. And the subtlety, or any ability you have to relate to something that you've experienced, is taken out of it because you're on a fuckin' spaceship. Are you fightin' aliens? What are you doing?

CM: I'm not at liberty to divulge that information. [laughs] It's more existential, like 2001 [1968].

CF: Or Solaris [1972].

CM: Yeah, there you go. It's sort of about how space fucks with people's minds. We can't survive without the sun and the air, and the sun is dying in this movie.

CF: So it's not that far-fetched.

CM: No! That's the truth, man. The sun will die. We just don't know when. I'm having a blast. It's the longest shoot I've ever done, too. You're on Miami Vice now nine months, yeah?

CF: I'm on this one now almost a year. I've been on it since January with prep and all that shit. We've been shooting since May, I think.

CM: The longest I'd ever been on a shoot before was, like, 10 weeks.

CF: How long have you been shooting now?

CM: Sixteen weeks, so about half as long as what you're doing.

CF: That's four months, man. If you lived to 70, that is about 1/180th of your whole life.

CM: [laughs] There you go, yeah.

CF: Man, you've had a mad couple of years, brother. Red Eye was a nice one, as well. It did remind me of Phone Booth [2003] a bit. I'm sure it's a pain in your bollocks, people sayin' that to you.

CM: Well, they say that as a compliment. The writer very openly admits that he was inspired by Phone Booth with the confined space and people under pressure. It was just a brilliant actor's piece to do.

CF: Yeah, you and Rachel McAdams were fuckin' great, man. She's gorgeous.

CM: She's amazing. She could do anything. She's just very down-to-earth and aware of the whole business.

CF: And to work with Wes Craven—he's really a fuckin' legend.

CM: Yeah, absolutely. That movie was designed to give the audience what they want when they go to see a Wes Craven movie, even though it was a slight departure for him.

CF: It wasn't particularly a gore-fest, yeah.

CM: There's a bit of that at the end, where I'm running around like Freddy Kruger.

CF: How was the Batman Begins trip?

CM: That one was mad because I was only on that movie for about three weeks. That's all my part took, on and off.

CF: Well, it felt like much more than that, which is a big compliment to you. It seemed like your role was a much bigger part of the whole grand scheme of things—even when you weren't on screen.

CM: Thanks, man. It was just a great thing to be involved in. I mean, you've worked with the legends. Sometimes it wasn't even in scenes with them, but they're just in the movie with you, and you think, Fuck, I'm in the movie with Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman! I have to say, though, I think I've done my quota of bad guys. No more fuckin' baddies ‘cause I'm the least likely villain.

CF: You're a scary old fuck. It started with Disco Pigs [2001] which I saw years ago. Obviously, you did that part onstage to such high acclaim, but in that film you were totally fuckin' mental.

CM: For me, what's interesting in drama is when you play people under pressure, or people who change dramatically. You get to go to places you never would. You get complete license to explore those dark interiors. I just find that a bit more interesting.

CF: Absolutely. It's never the smooth aspect of the character's life or psychology that you draw on. It's the bits of the characters that are either unsure of themselves or it's those dark places that are most interesting and make you fall in love with them. I'm talking about your new one, Breakfast on Pluto, because with your character, Kitten, there's an odyssey. It's like a journey home. You just fall in love with her. But the thing you fall in love with is not even her sense of humour or frivolity or easiness in certain situations where most of us would shit ourselves—it's that as much as she seems to fly in the face of adversity and know exactly who she is, she's still struggling to find her place in the world.

CM: Totally, man. Some people asked Neil Jordan if it was about the loss of innocence, and he corrected them very quickly, saying, "No, it's about the maintenance of innocence." Which I think is a very smart observation. Kitten really contradicts your normal narrative arc for a protagonist where they go from A to Z and they completely change. She kind of stays the same, and the people around her change. Her innocence and the kind of disco world that she insists on maintaining through every fucked-up situation that she gets in is what changes everyone else. What you see in the end is that there's a big change in Liam Neeson's character and even in the mother. The part where Ian Hart's character is beating the shit out of me in the interrogation room because he thinks I'm a member of the IRA, and eventually becomes my protector, is a complete flipside of the normal portrayal of how these police would deal with a suspected IRA person. So it's messin' with all that.

CF: Did you read the book?

CM: I'd been in love with Patrick McCabe's writing for years. I think The Butcher Boy is up there with Joyce and Beckett as a seminal piece of Irish literature. I really do. This is a kind of companion piece to it.

CF: It's a beautiful, absurd world. It's like taking everything that lives underneath, subterraneously, in all Irish people and bringing it to the surface, the stuff that's right under that bubbles up in us all. It's all there in our culture, hidden by bravado and circumstance, or whatever it may be. Your work in this movie is really gorgeous, Cillian. Really gorgeous.

CM: Well, thanks. Of all the characters I've played so far, Kitten is the one I have the most affection for. Those misfits you meet during your life are the ones you love the most—people who are just a little too weird or a little too smart or a little too strange who don't fit into normal society and get picked on. Kitten is that, but ultimately, she triumphs.

CF: Yeah, absolutely. So doin' all these movies, do you miss the stage at all? Because you've done incredible work onstage as well.

CM: I guess I do. But the problem with it is that it takes up so much time. We've always said that the great parts in theatre, like Hamlet and all these characters, are always gonna be there for time immemorial. But the movie parts come and go, so if there's a moment where you can play them, you've got to go and eat it up, man, the way you've done.

CF: Make hay while the sun shines, they say. But you know, while you're still enjoying it and still challenged by it, you stay on that road. Then when that road becomes too trodden by your own footstep, you leap off of it onto another path. That's what I'm thinking. I've got two pieces lined up within the next year and a half. Then I'm going take a year and just be with my family and my son. Just chill out, take it easy. It's six years now that I've been away. It's fine that we get a hotel room in the Dominic Republic. I mean, life ain't tough for me, don't get me wrong. But I'm just missing being home big-time.

CM: No matter where you are or how well you're looked after, you're always Irish and that's where you're always going to be drawn to.

CF: Well, listen. We'll leave it at that. I will give you a shout, man, or you give me a buzz, and we'll find each other over Christmas when we're in Dublin.

CM: Yeah, absolutely. Look after yourself, with those hurricanes.

CF: Oh, yeah. They've mostly gone north of us. When I was in Miami, Katrina passed by, and I was there for that, but we only got a lick of it. It's like the difference between sitting beside someone in a bar when they fart and sitting at the other end of the bar and thinking for a second that you smell something but it's gone, and you go, "Must've been an elephant."

CM: Spoken like a true meteorologist. [both laugh]

CF: Apparently they got all these names like Wilma on a list. They've gone to the Flintstones now, because they've run through so many fuckin' names.

CM: Jesus, man. It's been a crazy year.

CF: Yeah, record breaking. It's been like 12 or 13 storms—a lot of damage.

CM: Mother earth is saying something.

CF: Now that's another story for another time, man. Okay, take care.

CM: Bye, bye, bud.