Автор: Christopher Wallenberg

Rising Star Cillian Murphy takes on what he calls 'the character of a lifetime' in Breakfast on Pluto

Blessed with porcelain white skin, haunting blue eyes and a lithe figure, the luscious Cillian Murphy makes for a thoroughly believable boy in a dress in the new Neil Jordan flick Breakfast on Pluto. Playing an androgynous, glammed-out young gay lad with a predilection for cross-dressing, the boyish Murphy sashays and swishes across the screen with enough sass to make Carson Kressley look like Laura Bush.

2005 has been nothing short of a breakout year for the young Irish star, who first made a splash in 2002 as a bicycle messenger battling zombies in Danny Boyle's apocalyptic thriller 28 Days Later... He spent last summer scaring the bejesus out of moviegoers as the chillingly demented Scarecrow in Batman Begins and a diabolical terrorist in the thriller Red Eye—two of the biggest blockbusters of the season.

Now Murphy's whipping up some serious Oscar buzz—and has gay audiences all hot and bothered—for his gender-bending turn as Patrick "Kitten" Braden, a role that the actor deems his greatest yet.

"I put my heart and soul into Kitten," says Murphy during an interview at the New York Film Festival. "People talk about the character of a lifetime. I would easily say that about this part—in terms of the creative team, the transformative nature of the character. I was in love with the book before I ever became an actor."

Based on Patrick McCabe's 1992 novel, the fantasia of a film, which opens on December 23, unfolds in the manner of a colorful, Candide-like fairy tale. The story follows young Patrick's quest to find his mother, "the Phantom Lady," who abandoned him as a baby on the steps of the local church. Escaping from the stifling Irish village where he grew up, Patrick reinvents himself as the transvestite "Kitten," living in a dream world of his own making, and heads to London. The film is set in the early 1970s, and despite the political violence swirling around the character, the whispy-voiced Kitten remains an ever-optimistic soul in the face of a dark world that is so "serious, serious, serious."

Many have noted that Jordan's newest film shares its boy-in-drag premise and its backdrop of Irish political violence with his controversial, 1992 movie The Crying Game—in which moviegoers across America were shocked to learn that Jaye Davidson's supposedly female hairdresser was really a man. But the director insists that the two films are cut from entirely different cloths.

"It's weird isn't it? It must be the screaming queen inside of me," quips the famed Irish director of films such as Interview with a Vampire, The Butcher Boy, and Michael Collins. The Crying Game, though, is about somebody who is actually disguising himself. [Cillian's character] is a different kind of man. He's a deeply effeminate young boy, who constructs this character to keep his innocence intact."

Co-star Stephen Rea agrees: "Unlike The Crying Game, this character is not fooling anybody. In The Crying Game, you have a boy who is convincingly a woman and the whole movie turns on that. This boy's journey is into himself, to discover his real identity and to find a way to sustain himself in this awesomely orthodox world, [where there is] little emotional sustenance."

In creating the character, Murphy, who also starred in the films Intermission and Girl With a Pearl Earring, sought to avoid the flamboyant clichés that typically riddle Hollywood depictions of gay characters. "I wanted to be more feminine than effeminate," he says. "It's easy to be campy, but [more difficult] to be a feminine character that is not a contrivance but a genuine [trait]."

"What I love about the film is that the whole drag thing is sort of peripheral. It's less salient than you would imagine. And it happens incrementally. It's only at the very end that Kitten is in the full regalia."

To prepare for the role, Murphy reveals that he went to the clubs in London to meet and hang out with some of the drag queens there. "They're amazing and beautiful people, and you realize why they're so quick and acerbic—because they get fucking shouted at on the street all the time."

The actor even experienced some of that harassment first-hand when he dressed as Kitten and went out on the town, enduring his fair share of catcalls. Yet Murphy insists that donning a wig, dress, and heels was the least of his challenges. "It's easy enough to dress up as a woman and do the looking pretty thing," he says. "[The hard part] was trying to find the soul of the character, trying to find the beautiful goodness inside of this guy. If you don't believe in the character and invest in the character, then you have nothing."

What Murphy found most inspiring about Kitten was his unflappable nature. No matter what happens to him—being ridiculed in school and at home; rejected by his father, the town priest; betrayed by his glam rock lover Billy Rock (sic) (played by Gavin Friday), or nearly killed by a sadistic john (Bryan Ferry)—Kitten always manages to see the good in human nature. "It's unusual for a protagonist in a movie to not go through an A to Z arc. What happens with Kitten is that she's relentlessly herself, and people change around her as a result of it," he says. "Ultimately, she's a very strong character. It's like she represents the misfit in all of us—the misfits who love too easily and trust too easily, and so they get hurt too easily."