He lives quietly, dresses down, and even his swearing is gentle. But Cillian Murphy still can't disguise his evil streak.

Cillian Murphy has the kind of dead blue stare that could freeze bone marrow, a pair of impossible cheekbones and a chillingly winsome pout. Put together the result is unspeakably pretty and not a little evil. "It's only journalists who say that," counters the 29-year-old Irish actor. "But I suppose it's an obvious hook, an obvious way into a profile. But I've done two villains out of, like, 10 feature films. Next year they'll be saying, 'Do you only play transvestite astronauts?'"
Maybe, but those villains are hard to forget: the delicately fiendish Dr Jonathan Crane (a.k.a. Scarecrow) in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins and, more recently, silky-smooth psychopath Jackson Rippner in Wes Craven's Red Eye. Even in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later..., Murphy's feature-film breakthrough from 2002, his character Jim has a bit of a funny turn, changing from wide-eyed bicycle courier to wild-eyed zombie slayer. "Yes, he does get little cross," Murphy concedes.
Despite his clinical polish on screen, in person Murphy is far from scary. In fact, he's quite small and softly spoken (he even manages to diffuse the word "fucking") and very low-key: "I go everywhere and everyone leaves me alone. I don't go to parties or fucking openings or premiers. I'll go to my own, but why the fuck would I go to somebody else's?"
He's also a bit of a scruff. Dirty boots, jeans, hooded sweatshirt, heavy hooded coat (for a while he had both hoods up, Ewok-style), a mass of brown hair and some faintly gingerish sideburns. You almost expect a turnip to fall out of his pocket at any moment.
The hair, at least, he's not entirely responsible for: "Only 40 per cent of it is mine. I wouldn't have it so…big." He's sporting hair extensions for his role as a space traveller (the "astronaut" bit) on a prolonged mission to save the sun in Boyle's new sci-fi film, Sunshine. The cosmetic change was even more pronounced for his utterly convincing turn as the cross-dressing Patrick "Kitten" Braden (the "transvestite") in Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto.
Set in Ireland and London against a backdrop of seventies glam-rock and burgeoning IRA activity, the film charts mild-mannered Patrick's gradual reinvention as the understatedly glamorous Kitten while he is searching for the mother who abandoned him as a baby. "You know when actors say that 'role of a lifetime' thing? I think it actually applies to this part, because of the transformative nature of it," says Murphy. "Of all the characters I've played, this is the one I've had the most affection for. I still think about her and hope she's doing OK."
Kitten's trouble-laden journey takes her into the arms of various unsuitable men, including one Mr. Silky String, a "trick" she picks up in London, played by Bryan Ferry. Although the encounter ends somewhat uncomfortably for Silky, Murphy himself was choked for different reasons: "It was a great bit of stunt casting by Neil, because of all that Ferry represents and did back then, and I get much more of a kick out of meeting musicians than I do out of meeting actors."
Unlike acting, which Murphy says developed into a passion over time, music has always been a mainstay. "It's what I spend most of my money and time on," he says. A few years back, there were even rumours of a recording contract for his snappily named band, Sons of Mr. Greengenes (after a Frank Zappa song). At the Esquire photo shoot he sings along to Van Morrison (at least until "Have I Told You Lately" comes on, which he describes as "fucking cheesy as fuck") and breaks into a beatific smile when he's given permission to plug in his own iPod.
Sadly, The 'Genes reunion tour is likely to be postponed a while longer, as Murphy has been acting non-stop all year. Even the highly publicised U.K. premiere of Batman Begins was crammed in between takes on Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, in which Murphy plays a member of the IRA's "flying columns" in the early Twenties. "I flew in from Cork on the Sunday," he says, "Brought my family to the thing, didn't even get to see the movie, flew back to Cork and then I was out in a field the next day with a fucking rifle shooting Black and Tans."
It is Murphy's family instead who are starting to feel the effects of his busy schedule; his father has noted that he is no longer addressed as "Brendan but as "father of Cillian", and the kids to whom his mother teaches French have taken to calling her "Batmam." It could have been even worse for them, as at one point Murphy found himself auditioning for the main part: "It was a ludicrous idea, to have me play fucking billionaire Bruce Wayne. Christian Bale was always the obvious choice."
Murphy says the attention has tended to pass him by, however. "I guess I've been insulated from all that because I've been working, so I haven't noticed any dramatic shift. And anyway, other people's perceptions are something you can never be aware of, and I have no control over them." No cross-dressing space-walking psychopath ever spoke a truer word.