Автор: Soren Anderson
He ran from ravenous zombies through the deserted streets of London in 28 Days Later.... He bested Batman (temporarily, anyway) as The Scarecrow in Batman Begins. He was silky smooth and sinister as all get-out in the airborne airline thriller Red Eye.
Now, in filmmaker Irish Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, which opens today at Tacoma's Grand Cinema, Cillian Murphy tangles with IRA gunmen and British cops … in drag. His character, baptized Patrick Braden, goes by the name Kitten and is a transvestite from an Irish village near the border with Northern Ireland who spends the picture looking for love, acceptance and his/her long-departed mother.
Set during the '70s, when the so-called "Troubles" in Northern Ireland were at their height, Pluto mixes comedy and tragedy as Kitten is caught up in the sectarian strife.
With each performance, the 29-year-old Murphy is becoming more and more well-known to moviegoers worldwide, though there is probably only a handful outside of his native Ireland who know how to properly pronounce his name. For the record, it's "Kill-ian."
He heard all manner of manglings and mispronunciations after 28 Days Later... became a surprise hit in 2002. What were some of the choice ones?
"Oh man, I don't even want to talk about it," he said wearily during a recent telephone interview.
He's not nearly so reluctant to talk about the effect that picture had on his career. He calls it "a watershed."
Before 28 Days Later..., Murphy had done a lot of stage work in Ireland and appeared in a number of obscure European movies. The best-known of those was a 2001 British drama, Disco Pigs, in which he played the male lead (he had originated the role in the play on which the movie was based). The picture didn't get a commercial release in the U.S. As I said, obscure.
But then director Danny Boyle asked Murphy to play a young man who awakens in a hospital bed one day to find London eerily depopulated and in the grip of a plague of zombies. With a few other survivors, he flees for his life from the hungry undead.
"It was a courageous thing for him to go and cast me and put the weight of the movie on my shoulders," Murphy said of Boyle. "I owe him a great debt, to have given me that responsibility. I hope I repaid him."
Calling Boyle "the most energized director I ever worked with," Murphy said, "I learned a huge amount about film acting from him, about what was required, especially in a leading role."
Lesson No. 1: "Film acting is about acting in moments."
"When you're onstage, you can tell the whole story. You can play scenes that refer back to earlier scenes." Not so in film.
Scenes in films are shot out of sequence. The process is all disjointed, and the actor doesn't have the comfort of continuity, of developing a role in a linear step-by-step fashion.
"When you're in a film, the audience wants to deal with what's here and now, in the moment. And when you come on the screen, you have to own that scene, you have to own that moment. It's all about commitment and energy."
Boyle taught him that, and Murphy was, and remains to this day, grateful. So much so that he's working with his mentor once more, playing an astronaut in a sci-fi picture called Sunshine that's due out later this year.
An immediate cult sensation, 28 Days Later... re-energized the zombie genre. Without it, it's unlikely that such diverse undead epics as the cheeky Shaun of the Dead or the gruesome remake of Dawn of the Dead, both released in 2004, would ever have been made.
And with it, Murphy's phone suddenly began to ring and ring with filmmakers and dealmakers showering him with offers. "You get offered a lot of trash," he said of his sudden fame, "and you turn it down. And you wait for the quality to come along. And it did."
It did when Christopher Nolan, the director of Batman Begins called. He wanted to screen test Murphy for the role of Batman.
Murphy was flattered, and interested. He flew from Ireland, where he was performing in a play, to the U.S. to test for the part. He didn't get it.
He says he didn't mind. Really.
"I'm not," the Irishman said firmly, "Batman material." Christian Bale, a Welshman, was.
"It went to the best man," Murphy said of Bale, adding, "He's been the best Batman yet."
Nolan was impressed enough with Murphy's test to offer him the role of Jonathan Crane, aka The Scarecrow, the coldblooded scientist who uses a toxic gas to try to bring Gotham City to its knees. Murphy played him with freezing calm. And a flawless American accent.
After Batman Begins, he went to work for director Wes Craven, playing a terrorist terrorizing Rachel McAdams in an airliner at 30,000 feet in Red Eye. Once again, he was the soul of silken menace. Once again, his American accent was perfect.
The fact that his last two pictures found him playing villains was just a fluke of studio release schedules, he said. In Breakfast on Pluto, he's the good guy. Or rather, good girl. At least in the eyes of the guy, who prefers to dress up like a girl and act like one as well. Pluto has been rolling out slowly to theaters across the country since late last year, which is ironic because although it's coming out after Batman Begins and Red Eye, Murphy was actually approached by director Neil Jordan to play its lead role four years ago, long before the actor landed his parts in the Hollywood pictures. It took Jordan a long time to find financing.
But it is, even more than 28 Days Later..., all Murphy's show. The captivating and conflicted Kitten is in practically every scene, puzzling and provoking virtually everyone the character meets.
Murphy calls Kitten "a transformative role, the most unique character that I've ever played and the one, to date, that I have the most affection for."
"I still think about her," he said, "and hope she's OK."
CILLIAN MURPHY
Born: May 25, 1976, in County Cork, Ireland
Parents: Father is a school inspector, mother is a teacher.
Marital status: Married to Yvonne McGuinness. They have a son, Malachy.
Before going into acting: He studied law and played guitar in a band called Sons of Mr. Greengenes.
Proper way to pronounce his first name: Kill-ian.
Filmography includes: Sunshine (due out later this year); The Wind That Shakes the Barley (due sometime later this year); Breakfast on Pluto (2005) as Patrick "Kitten" Braden; Red Eye (2005) as Jackson Rippner; Batman Begins (2005) as Dr. Jonathan Crane/The Scarecrow; Cold Mountain (2003) as Bardolph; Girl With a Pearl Earring (2003) as Pieter; Intermission (2003) as John; 28 Days Later...(2002) as Jim; Disco Pigs (2001) as Pig; Eviction (1999) as Brendan McBride
| 
