Автор: Craig McLean

If his parents had let him, Cillian Murphy might now be a rock star. Instead, music's loss has been film's gain. The actor talks to Craig McLean about his latest role, as a beautiful drag queen called Kitten. Photograph by Keiron O'Connor.

Cillian Murphy shakes the rain from his shoulders, carefully pulls back the hood of his duffel coat, sits down and scans the wine list. It's late in the evening, and we are in a Spanish bar-cum-restaurant in Queen's Park, a discreetly pricey part of north-west London. The 29-year-old Irish actor has come not from the set of Danny Boyle's new film, Sunshine, with a brief detour home to see his wife, Yvonne, and five-week old son, Malachi (sic).

"Ah, it's great," he says of fatherhood. No, the lack of sleep isn't getting to him. Yvonne, an artist from Dublin, whom he met when he was 20, is coping just fine. It obviously helps that, after two big Hollywood films—Batman Begins and Sam Raimi's (sic) Red Eye—Murphy's job is keeping him near home just now.

Sunshine is a decently budgeted sci-fi thriller, being filmed at 3 Mills studios in East London.

The sun is dying, and part of it has burnt out. A team of scientists led by Murphy must journey into space to "refire" the sun; a tricky enough task even without the knowledge that the previous emergency team sent there disappeared.

"I've been reading all these physics books and books about space, which I don't think my brain has the ability to absorb," Murphy says. "Yet it's bouncing around in there, and hopefully it will come out some way in the character." For actors, he adds with a smile, this is "the deal: you learn a lot of information very quickly and very superficially."

Sunshine reunites Murphy, Boyle and the scriptwriter Alex Garland (the author of The Beach)—the three of them worked together on 2002's zombie movie 28 Days Later.... Boyle more or less plucked Murphy from indie obscurity and, with the film's huge success, watched him turn into an actor known, and highly regarded, in Hollywood.

"Cillian is tremendously exiting as an actor," Boyle says, "and yet he doesn't force himself down your throat. In 28 Days Later... the big risk was he had to have vulnerability, because that was his nature [his character was a bicycle courier]. But he had to emerge as a vengeful character, somebody who was prepared to take on Chris Eccleston [playing an Army officer]. That's not easy, and he did it. Then the success of the film boosted his confidence."

Murphy is a truly mesmerising screen presence. Quiet and unassuming in the flesh, he uses his blank slate as a launchpad to construct wholly believable characters. His acting icons are people such as Philip Seymour Hoffman, mutable character players who immerse themselves in a dizzying and unpredictable range of roles.

Not only did 28 Days Later... give Cillian Murphy a name in America, it also, he notes pithily, taught Hollywood how to pronounce that name (it's "Killian"). He landed parts playing villains in both Batman Begins and Red Eye—he was the Scarecrow in Chris Nolan's dark revitalisation of the Dark Knight franchise, and an in-flight hostage-taker-cum-assassin in Raimi's (sic) thriller.

Neil Jordan, who directed him in his latest film, Breakfast on Pluto, remembers his first encounter with a young Murphy. In a Dublin editing suite he glimpsed by changes the rushes for a film called On The Edge. "Here was this guy driving a car over a cliff, and he folded his arms and looked right at you. That was Cillian. It was extraordinary," the director recalls. "Cillian's got those amazing eyes—and he knows how not to blink. It's amazing the kind of effect he has on a viewer."

That Look is one of Murphy's signature skills. His heavy-lidded, liquid eyes and curly smile, while strikingly handsome, can also convey all manner of malevolence with the slightest twitch. In Breakfast on Pluto these features turn a new trick: they telegraph gorgeous feminine beauty. Jordan's fantastic, and occasionally fantastical, film is the story of a boy's search for the mother who abandoned him as a baby. Murphy plays Patrick Braden, whose quest takes him from his teens in early 1970s Ireland, through the glam rock years, and into London at the beginning of the IRA's mainland bombing campaign.

He may have been born a boy named Patrick, but he is more naturally comfortable in the drag-queen alter-ego that takes over his life. Kitten is an androgynous beauty with a painfully romantic imagination. She casts a spell over all who meet her, from the lads on the building site who wolf whistle at the beginning of the film to Stephen Rea's bumbling but romantic magician, from Liam Neeson's avuncular priest to Ian Hart's bullet-headed copper. His/her story is one of defiant survival in the face of rejection, abuse and even an attempt on her life.

Murphy gives a moving and, yes, sexy performance in this picaresque, semi-modern fairy tale—a performance that was achieved only partly by Murphy's weight loss, thrice-daily saving routine and brilliant hair and make-up. "At the screen test Cillian came with the character right from the inside," Jordan says. "I didn't want it to be a pastiche or a drag sage. And Cillian gave this little performance that was extraordinarily emotional."

Murphy had make-up meticulously applied, both to soften his jaw line and to reflect the changing fashions as the film's timeline progresses. He learnt to walk, elegantly, in an array of fabulous dresses. Different hair-pieces were used, with Kitten memorably ending up a blonde bombshell in skimpy lingerie while working in a peep show.

Murphy was intent on making Kitten "feminine rather than effeminate". He spent several nights in Soho, talking to drag queens and hanging out in bars. "They were sweet, sweet people," he recalls with affection. ‘The reason they're so quick [with their wit] is because people shout stuff at them all the time. They only want to look pretty. What's wrong with that? That's all Kitten wants."

Jordan first screen-tested Murphy for the part in 1999. Patrick McCabe's source book was not long published; Jordan had previously adapted McCabe's The Butcher Boy, with great success. The director knew then Murphy was right for the part. And so did Murphy: over the intervening year, as Jordan was distracted by other projects, Murphy would periodically pester him—when was he going to make Breakfast on Pluto?

"I realised it was a special role," Murphy says. He was also a huge fan of Jordan and of McCabe: "A fascinating man." He thinks The Butcher Boy "is up there with Joyce and Beckett". While filming 2003's Dublin-set thriller Intermission, which Jordan co-produced, Murphy bugged the director again: if he got much older than his late twenties, he would be too old for a part that starts out when Patrick/Kitten is a teenager.

His persistence has paid off. Breakfast on Pluto is the making of Murphy as an actor an empathetic, captivating performance that people will talk about all next year.

Cillian Murphy grew up in Cork, the eldest of four. His father, a school inspector, and mother, a French teacher, had saved up to send him to Presentation Brothers college, a private school big on academia and rugby. Neither was of much appeal to Murphy. But being the first son he knew he had to get a proper job and was reluctantly heading towards a law degree. It was a case of "first born, do the right thing, go on, we're very proud of you," he says. "No other reason."

When Murphy was in his fourth year Pat Kiernan, a former pupil who had become director of the local Corcadorca theatre company, came into the school to run some acting workshops. Murphy improvised a Foreign Legion story, complete with comedy French accent. The experience gave him a buzz, "a rush down my back", something he puts down to the performing gene—"you can't get rid of it". Whenever he saw Kiernan "on the piss" in Cork, he would ask him when he was going to cast him in a play.

A more immediate manifestation of his love of the stage was in music, Murphy's first passion. (All of his family are musical—his father plays harmonica and Jew's harp, his mother guitar, his grandfather piano.) He and his younger brother Páidi had a band, the Sons of Mr. Green Genes, named after a Frank Zappa song. Murphy was the rhythm guitarist, singer and lyricist.

"We were kind of weird. We had 10-minute songs, 'Stinkin' Man' was one of our tunes," he grins. "That's how we were influenced by Zappa—weird lyrics and long, talky songs, and big long guitar solos. Live, we were brilliant, but it just never translated to record."

In the summer of 1996 everything in his life changed. He had just turned 20. The band were offered a three-album contract with the London record label Acid Jazz. At one of their Cork gigs he met his future wife, Yvonne, an art student. While hitchhiking around France he called home—his parents told him he had failed his first year of law studies, but Kiernan had finally cast him in a play. It was called Disco Pigs and Kiernan was directing. His parents posted the script to him at a French campsite.

"August 1996 was the big one. I was the cockiest little bastard on the planet!" Acting was "the most exciting thing in the world. I had nothing to lose. I didn't realise the brilliance of the writing or the brilliance of the directing. We were just doing this for three months, going to the Dublin Theatre Festival. On the piss every night, go straight from rehearsals to rehearsals with the band, go and sleep at Yvonne's flat, fall back into rehearsals the next morning. It was just great!"

His parents refused to let the boys sign their record deal. It would have meant the brothers moving to London, and Páidi was still at school. So, having re-sat his first-year law exams, Murphy went back to college for his second year. However, after the good reception at the Dublin Theatre Festival, Disco Pigs was going to the Edinburgh Festival and on to London. Kiernan asked Murphy if he wanted to be involved. Murphy, having been denied his rock 'n' roll dreams, thought, "Right, I'm gonna be an actor now." In January 1997 he gave up his legal studies.

Various Irish independent films followed, then a big-screen version of Disco Pigs (2001), directed by Kirsten Sheridan, on which he sang his own composition "So Low" (sic) over the closing credits. He cut his teeth in theatre work, too, plus a bit part in the novelist William Boyd's First World War drama The Trench alongside Daniel Craig. It was around that time he made the move to London.

Then, the break: Boyle, who had seen Disco Pigs, cast him in 28 Days Later.... "Yeah, I owe those guys..." Murphy begins, "No," he corrects himself, "it's not about owing. 28 Days Later... was a wonderful experience, and a success, and now we're doing it again [with Sunshine], and it just feels great. But definitely, career-wise, it was a watershed."

Small parts in mainstream films, Girl With A Pearl Earring and Cold Mountain, led to an audition to be the new Batman, a role eventually won by Christian Bale—"silly concept" he mutters now, as if embarrassed by his own brass neck. But Chris Nolan came back to him later when casting the Scarecrow, a character Murphy imbued with an impressive fear factor.

Even following his states of Hollywood, Murphy has refused to follow the money. He has recently been working with Ken Loach on The Wind That Shakes The Barley, about the Irish War of Independence in the 1920s.

Danny Boyle says that, because there is a lot of down-time on a special-effects-heavy movie Murphy has been off-camera a lot on Sunshine. "And I've noticed him reading a lot of scripts—he's clearly getting offered a lot. But as Pacino or De Niro said, genius is in the choices. Look at the directors he's worked with: Chris Nolan, Sam Raimi, (sic) Ken Loach, Neil Jordan—a lot of actors would kill to have worked with a range of directors like that. And it shows: he was good to start with but I've been shocked at how much he's learnt, and how much he's come on."

The options are there but the high-profile actor life is not for Cillian Murphy. His pleasures are still songwriting and, of late, getting better at the ukulele. He is close to his family, and lived at home in Cork while shooting the Loach film. His parents were worried when he gave up university and was on the dole in Dublin for a year, but are now beamingly proud. He is constantly in touch with his brother, now a design engineer, and his two sisters, studying in Ireland.

As Murphy finishes his third glass of red wine, one of his sisters texts from Cork to tell him she has just been to see the electronic folk artist Adem. Music is still a serious passion. He goes to concerts when he can—he is gutted at missing the previous evening's Strokes gig in London. He wears clothes by Edun, the ethical fashion line set up by Bono and his wife Ali Hewson. Meeting rock stars, he says, gives him a far bigger kick than meeting actors. "Every time I go to a gig," he admits with a smile, "there's a little voice inside me going, 'I wish it was me.'"