Filming on Home Turf, Irish Actor Turns in a Natural Performance

Cillian Murphy is a hard actor to describe, especially in light of the diverse and challenging roles he has played. But his latest film, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, offers a great opportunity to be struck by one of his most raw and straightforward performances.

"The whole experience was totally unique, totally untainted or untouched by the normal nonsense that's around filmmaking," Murphy said of his experience working on British director Ken Loach's film, which won the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

The story takes place in the 1920s in Cork, Ireland's second largest city. Murphy plays a young man who gives up becoming a doctor in London to join the Irish Republican Army and fight for the country's independence.

The Irish actor (whose name is pronounced Killian) is probably best known for playing the Scarecrow, an unfeeling villain, in director Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005) and his leading role in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later... (2002). And most recently and sensationally, he charmed moviegoers in Tokyo playing an adorable transvestite in Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto (2005).

Through his well-prepared and meticulous portrayals of these various characters, Murphy has left a powerful impression each time, but such chameleonlike talent also makes it hard for audiences to describe the actor himself.

But playing the main role for this film, Murphy found himself deeply immersed in instinctual acting—which is "to strip away all the analyzing and all the intellectualizing and just serve the script and serve the story."
What made this possible is Loach's unique approach to filmmaking, in which he gives the actors most of their lines and explains the scenes on the day of shooting. The amount of information given varies for each actor.

Although such a method requires the actors to improvise around the dialogue, Murphy didn't mind it at all.
"I absolutely adore that way of working...you don't spend hours poring over words and deciding on how you're gonna say them—it just happens, and that to me is what acting should be about," he said.

Murphy has appeared in a number of stage plays and films, but as a man from Cork, where the story is set, taking part in this film means something special.

"Cork has always been a very strong area of Ireland in terms of resistance against [the] British, so also a civil war leaves a scar on a nation and on a people, and I think that was very much the case in Cork," he said.

His family is not an exception. Murphy had a distant cousin in a flying column who was shot dead by the Black and Tans, squads recruited in England to quell the armed movement for Irish independence.

Living in the era through the character has deepened his respect for those who fought for freedom.

"I was 29 when I shot the film and I think those men and women were 20, 21, even younger, and they were hugely committed...their vision for Ireland was something special, and many of them died trying to bring that to fruition. And I only hope this film serves their memory justly," said the actor.

Speaking in a hotel room in Tokyo during a visit to promote the film, a casually dressed Murphy projected more of a modern, trendy image, not a bit overlapping with what is seen in the film, except for his piercing blue eyes.

A massive economic boom in the past decade has made Ireland a prosperous European country, blurring its image as a nation haunted by a blighted history. Becoming focused more on the future, do young Irish, like Murphy, still want to be reminded of darker times?

"People of my generation in Ireland wouldn't know the finer details of this time, and I think it's only a healthy thing that this is happening now, that people are looking at this movie and beginning to understand where our country comes from," Murphy said confidently.

Unlike Jordan's Michael Collins (1996), a movie about the legendary Irish revolutionary leader from the same period, starring Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts, Loach's film features ordinary people involved in the struggle at the grassroots level, such as farmers, laborers, and shopkeepers.

Being a firm believer that everyone can act, the director cast some local people who had never acted before—a daring tactic, but one that added authenticity to the film.

"He [Loach] engages people on a human level and also on a political level...in this film, it's a very engaging story, hopefully emotionally, because you invest in these characters. They're ordinary people—that hopefully the audience can identify with—that find themselves in extraordinary situations," he said.

Murphy, who believes the film is accessible to anyone, doesn't think the audience particularly needs to be versed in Irish history to understand it.

"If you wish to go further and engage politically, you can see how a story like this may have resonance in today's climate and relate to other conflicts that are going on," he said.

Indeed, the scenes of brutality by the Black and Tans may turn some viewers' thoughts to what they've recently read about Iraq in newspapers.

When asked about the Iraq situation specifically, Murphy said: "Well, people can draw that parallel if they wish. I don't think that it's going to be prescriptive, it's going to be you choosing to what degree you wish to engage with it on."

The film, however, sparked extremely negative reactions in Britain. Among those to condemn Loach was columnist Tim Luckhurst, who wrote in The Times, "He still treats IRA killers like cuddly hippies, still detests the British State that educated him and pays for his films."

In the face of such harsh criticism, Murphy countered with a grin: "Well, I actually enjoy talking about this...if it's to say that [this film] is glorifying the IRA, I think that's also short-sighted because there's a scene in the film where I have to shoot dead a 16-year-old traitor."

"Similarly, the last act of the film is about the civil war, where the whole nation's split apart, and it's well documented also that the violence carried out when it was Irishmen against Irishmen was far more vicious and bloody than the war of independence."

Was this a scripted defense or a spontaneous one?

Perhaps it doesn't matter because whatever approach this versatile actor takes on or off the screen, he seems equally convincing.