Tony Clayton-Lea speaks to up-and-coming Irish actor Cillian Murphy about the meteoric rise of his career.

A new breed of young Irish actor is slowly taking the place of those who started their career in the 1980s. Wellknown Irish actors such as Aidan Quinn, Pierce Brosnan, Stephen Rea. Liam Neeson and Colm Meany (sic) had better look over their shoulders at the likes of Colin Farrell, Jonathan Rhys Myers and Cillian Murphy, three young actors ready, willing and able to take on their elders at the business they call show.

While Farrell and Rhys Myers have already landed on their feet in Hollywood, Murphy is biding his time between celluloid and stage, two areas he is extremely comfortable working in.

"I have a great love of theatre, which is where I started," the young actor says. Murphy starred last year in Druid Theatre's production of John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, so clearly his love of stagecraft continues. "Not having been trained in any way was my training—I learnt as I went along, and I'm still learning. But I think you learn quicker on stage, because you get an instantaneous reaction. You change and you grow into the part because you do it every night. I also love the whole rehearsal process in theatre, the buzz of opening night, the way the play grows organically." And film?

Murphy's most recent cinematic appearances have been in The Girl with the Pearl Earring (sic), Batman Begins, Red Eye and the award-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley. "I love the magic of cinema, the way it's storyboarded in a chronological fashion as you're shooting, capturing moments correctly. It's more detailed." While not an encyclopaedic film buff, Murphy admits to studying actors. The young Al Pacino he regards as "revealing, honest"; James Dean, he reckons, is "a force of nature." Other actors he admires are Philip Seymour Hoffman and Johnny Depp. What underlines the names he mentions is a solid sense of a person not wanting to be typecast, and of wanting to obtain as much respect as commercial kudos.

Born May 25th, 1976, Murphy is from a line of educationalists: his mother and father are teachers, as are his aunts and uncles, as was his grandfather. In a different generation, he says, he could have become a teacher. "My parents wanted me to experience as much as I could," he says. "Teaching is one of the hardest jobs in the world, and they're very undervalued. But it wasn't for me."

Following second-level education, he chose to study law at University College Cork, but failed to complete the course. "College for me was a bit of a disaster," he reveals. "I did 18 months in UCC, studying Law, but it was the wrong thing for me. Why did I choose Law? I thought I might have some facility for it, but I didn't. Legal language is the most boring thing in the world, and there's little scope for creativity. It took me about a day or two to realise I had made a dreadful mistake. It's almost vocational, you have to have a moral streak in you, and I didn't. Constitutional Law I quite liked, because it was linked to history, but it's like learning a language. All the other people on the course had their lives mapped out for them, whereas I didn't have a clue."

Opting instead for a full-time career in acting was something Murphy's parents initially disapproved of, but time has shown he made the right decision. Working in Cork-based theatre company Corcadorca whilst in college, Murphy auditioned and got the part of Pig in playwright Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs. "The acting was really an accident," he comments, underplaying his ambitions. "I didn't come into it until very late in my teens. I was more into music, such as listening to Cork-based rock bands—to be honest, that's what I thought I'd end up doing."

After an initial run in Cork, Disco Pigs was invited to take part in the 1996 Dublin Fringe Festival. From there, it travelled to Edinburgh, London, Budapest and Toronto, picking up a trail of accolades wherever it was staged, and affording Murphy the kind of acting experiences he would never have been privy to had he stayed on to finish his degree.

Like most good actors, Murphy strives for total honesty and conviction in whatever character he plays. "You have to have conviction in the alternative reality that is set up by the director, the writer and the actors. You have to believe that—obviously you discuss and throw ideas back and forth—but if you question the reality or the place you're in when you're doing it, it tends to fall short."

All this acting talk is a far cry from over 10 years ago when, as a college student, the thought of exchanging the Cork argot for the language of legalise was too miserable a thing to contemplate. "I didn't even think I'd be acting then," Murphy concludes. "It's been very weird, but it hasn't changed my life in any way—something that people find difficult to believe."

What does he think he's like as an actor? "I can never be objective," he answers. "That's a very dangerous question, and something I couldn't even offer an opinion on! I know as an actor I put a lot of trust in directors. I've been lucky to work with really good directors who allow you to take a fall and experiment with stuff—people who push you into areas you wouldn't think of going into yourself. If I think about doing that too much, however, I get wrapped up in the process too much, so I prefer to act with whatever instincts I may possess." And what about fame? "It's all very peripheral, isn't it? As far as I'm concerned it's about the work. As for the celebrity and entertainment magazines, I don't think I'll be featured in them—there's nothing very interesting to find out about me. What you see is what you get.