The Daily Telegraph - Features
How Cillian Murphy became ‘the greatest actor of his generation’
Guy Kelly traces the star’s curious path to fame – from jazz musician to Bafta winner
If you were thirsty and bored enough, you could play a perfectly good – albeit lethal – drinking game based solely on the magazine profiles of Cillian Murphy.
Big sips for “prefers the quiet life”, “low-key”, or “refuses to play the fame game”; another for his being a frustrated musician; for how he manages to look both innocent and menacing, as employed to such great effect as Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders; and for still being able to pass as a teenager at 47. And finish your drink if you come across the idea his career has been a slow-burn. The annoying thing is that they’re all true.
Mercifully, over the next month, a new epithet is likely to be added to all future Murphy profiles, and one which may just kill off the “slow-burn” thing forever: “Bafta and Oscar-winner.” The former is now sealed after his all-consuming performance as the title character in Christopher Nolan’s
Oppenheimer saw him win Best Actor at the Baftas on Sunday; it’s now odds-on the Academy Award will follow on March 10. Nolan has called him “the greatest actor of his generation”. It’s becoming difficult to quibble with that.
As a child, Murphy famously didn’t hold ambitions to act at all. The eldest of four siblings in a family of teachers, his first love was music. With school friends in Cork, he set up a Frank Zappainspired acid jazz band, Sons of Mr Green Genes, that were relatively successful. But he did eventually get into acting, appearing first in the Enda Walsh play Disco Pigs. In the same month, August 1996, Sons of Mr Green Genes were offered a record deal but turned it down. He also met the artist Yvonne McGuinness at a gig. They married eight years later, have two teenage sons, and live by the sea in a Dublin suburb.
After parts in smaller films, Danny Boyle’s 2002 zombie drama
28 Days Later saw him stagger, blinking into the mainstream, as well as into Nolan’s purview, before he played a transgender woman in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005), and an IRA fighter in Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006). Murphy insists he rarely watches his own films, especially “the ones I hear are not good”, but in reality that’s a short list. Early bit-parts in Cold Mountain and Girl With the Pearl Earring introduced him to Hollywood. Nolan’s Inception and Boyle’s Sunshine, the latter of which he shadowed and copied the mannerisms of Professor Brian Cox for, were the kind of highconcept hits that paved the way for a slew of tricksy sci-fi blockbusters released in the 2010s.
Yet it was a TV role, in Peaky Blinders, that changed his life. Steven Knight’s BBC series about a criminal dynasty in interwar Birmingham, in which Murphy played Tommy Shelby, the terrifying gang leader, made him a global star. (He beat Jason Statham to the role, so the enshrined lore has it, by texting Knight to say, “Remember, I’m an actor.”)
Over six series, Murphy weathered the storm of fan interest in the show, and in him, by being himself. When he turned 40, he announced that after a wilderthan-we’d-believe few decades in London he was “ready for a bit more… decorum, I guess? A bit more moderation? Still enjoying being a young man, but looking over the wall into the other side, you know?”
“A bit more moderation” is working out in one sense, then, but it also meant taking on the biggest role of his life. Playing J Robert Oppenheimer involved years of research and preparation, weight loss, thousands more herbal cigarettes and a commitment to the project (he is in almost every frame) that rendered socialising with his co-stars and crew impossible. Yet still they adored him. “He’s just a lovely, sane person. He’s so, so sane.” Emily Blunt told GQ. Murphy was asked last week how on earth he decompressed after filming eventually finished on Oppenheimer. “Eh, I had a big sandwich and a pint of Guinness,” he said. So sane.
Around awards season, Murphy has been back at work. His plus one at the Baftas was Max Porter, the writer of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, the stage adaptation of which Murphy starred in at the Barbican a few years ago; they’re currently adapting Porter’s novel Lanny for Netflix. Meanwhile, last week he was premiering his next film, Small Things Like These, at Berlin Film Festival on Thursday. Murphy, who also produced the film, plays a quiet, complex man in it, of course.
But in three weeks’ time, with the eyes of the world on the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, he may well get an even greater prize than the Bafta, one which elevates this most enigmatic of actors and most interesting of careers into another league entirely.