Автор: Gabriella Coslovich

Cillian Murphy sets his sneaker-clad feet up on the hotel room coffee table, slumps into his armchair, knees up, and fixes you with his striking, glacial blue eyes.

Clearly, he would rather be anywhere but here, holed up in his Park Hyatt suite, doing back-to-back interviews about his role in the harrowing new Ken Loach film, The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

His air is a touch intimidating, but then he is famous for being averse to the whole fame thing. Murphy is no Hollywood show pony, and if he might seem a little chilly, at least he does not dish out glib answers to questions about his work.

Like Damian, the medical student turned Irish Republican Army rebel he plays in Loach's epic new film, Murphy has a simmering intensity.

He chooses his roles carefully, whether working with independent directors such as Loach or Neil Jordan (Breakfast on Pluto), or playing Hollywood villains in films such as Batman Begins and Red Eye.

"I want to be doing this for a long, long time," says Murphy, who lives in west London with his wife, Yvonne McGuinness, an artist, and their 11-month-old son, Malachy.

"And I think if that's the case, you've got to wait for the good things to come along, and try to avoid the trash. I don't mind kicking around the house for a few months while I'm waiting for something worthwhile." Loach, an Englishman renowned for his highly humanist and political films, was one man worth waiting for, even though Murphy was not entirely sure what he was getting himself into.

"Ken Loach doesn't give his actors the script," he says. "I didn't know anything about the film, other than I was going to be one of two brothers who was a doctor who became involved in the struggle. Generally, for me, the script is always the foundation, the calling card. But you make an exception for Ken Loach."

"He's a master of cinema, and I think any actor worth his salt would want to work with Ken."

Yet it was only because he was born in Cork, where the film is set, that Murphy was able to audition. Loach, who strives for authenticity, has a custom of hiring locals, including untrained actors, for his projects.

The film, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year and opens in Melbourne next week, is a devastating work about the Irish Republican Army's revolt against the British in the early 1920s, and the civil war that followed the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.

The brutality and absurdity, the terrible cycle of vengeance that it triggers, are at the forefront of Loach's film. One cannot help but draw parallels to latter-day conflicts and invasions, especially when lines such as these are uttered: "How can there be a free election in this country when the most powerful country in the world threatens war?"

The film provoked the right-wing press in England, and several Tory politicians, who called for it to be banned, branding it "poisonously anti-British."

"I think it was inevitable that they would react like that," Murphy says. "I actually think it was a good thing because it got people talking … a bit of controversy doesn't do anybody any harm."