Category: Cillian Murphy

Last year, you could see the unease fall across Cillian Murphy’s face as soon as the Oppenheimer promotion began. He quickly developed a thousand-yard stare, a sort of forced blankness as he tried to promote his starring role in the biggest movie of his career. He eventually swept the awards season, winning the Golden Globe, BAFTA, SAG and Academy Awards. By Oscar night, his social battery was completely drained and it showed, but he still managed to get through it. In between filming Oppenheimer and promoting Oppenheimer, Cillian produced and worked on Small Things Like These, set in Ireland and filmed there too. It’s based on a bestseller by the same name, and the story is based on the real-life Magdalene Laundries, which continued well into the 1990s. To promote the film (which comes out in November), Cillian recently spoke to Vanity Fair, and he confirmed that the awards season was super-painful.

How Matt Damon came on a producer: “I gave the script to Matt [Damon] when we were shooting, and he loved it,” the Irish native tells me. Murphy made a specific sell to his Oppenheimer costar that won Damon over: “I remember saying that it’s a different film, but it would share some thematic crossover with Manchester by the Sea, which Matt also produced…. It was like I was pitching between Manchester by the Sea and Doubt.” From there, Murphy gave Damon the script, and swiftly, Damon signed on to produce the project via Artists Equity, the company he cofounded with Ben Affleck. “They paid for the movie,” Murphy says bluntly. “It was remarkably quick, the way it came together.”

The tragic history of Magdalene Laundries: “It’s so seemingly simple, but it’s incredibly complex, actually, when you look at it. It’s massively intertwined with Irish people, our history and our culture and trauma and all of that stuff. I feel that sometimes art is a gentler way of addressing or confronting that than, perhaps, government reports or academic papers.”

How he felt after Oppenheimer: “I was pretty broken after Oppenheimer. Just physically and mentally, I was a bit worn out. We shot that film so fast, and the prep for it had been very intense. Losing all that weight was hard to do—and it was hard to get back to normal.” It’s no wonder, then, that the actor took a long break, of well over six months total, once filming finished on the Christopher Nolan epic. Small Things Like These was his first time back on a movie set, months after wrapping Oppenheimer, and he needed that recharging period before delving into another intense character.

Shooting the film in Ireland: “I was very happy to make a film at home.” But Murphy found the weight of Bill’s trauma difficult to carry at times, particularly after filming an especially emotionally draining scene in a barber shop. “It does exact a bit of a cost,” Murphy says. “Your psyche is trying to understand why you’re feeling what you’re making yourself feel.”

He hasn’t fully processed his awards season: “It was a bit of a fever dream, and very overwhelming.”

[From Vanity Fair]

It sounds like working on Oppenheimer was harder than promoting it, although Cillian lucked out (inadvertently) with the actors’ strike and writers’ strike. I’m glad he had time to decompress after he shot Oppenheimer, and I would assume he did the same after the awards season too. It’s so funny to watch a full-grown introverted adult man deal with all of the craziness that comes with a huge box office success and winning a lot of awards. Props to Cillian though – he did it without whining or throwing tantrums. As for Small Things Like These, I’m really interested in seeing it, although I know it’s going to make me mad. All of that Catholicism and Church abuses, all of it in plain sight. More art pieces need to be made about this awful chapter of Irish history.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

Cillian Murphy is currently promoting Tim Mielants’s Small Things Like These. Cillian produced it, and he asked Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Artists Equity to step in as producers as well (they agreed). The film is adapted from a book of the same name, a fictional story based on the real horrors of Ireland in the 1980s – the Magdalene Laundries and the “fallen women,” the pregnant girls and women who were kidnapped and abused by the Catholic Church. Cillian recently spoke to the Irish Times and it got very personal about how horrible Ireland was forty years ago:

Cillian on the horrors of Ireland in the 1980s: “Let’s put it into perspective. It’s 1984 going into 1985. In 1984 you had the Kerry babies. In 1985 you had the moving statues. No abortion. No divorce. I think you were just able to get condoms, maybe by prescription. But it’s like the f**king dark ages compared to now. The film deliberately is trying to blur the lines. When you look at it, it could be the 1950s in many ways….you hear Come on Eileen and you think, ‘We’re in the 1980s.’ But a lot had remained the same since the 1950s. I have talked to my parents about it. We were young, obviously. I was 11 or something. We were kids, but it was a totally different time. I think when people call this a historical drama it seems bizarre. But it really does feel like another country.”

How women were viewed back then: “My mum told me this amazing expression. She said that, when she was growing up, there was this expression, ‘Lipstick on the lips, dust on the shelf.’” Good Lord. Meaning, presumably, that the sort of woman who would wear make-up wouldn’t clean the house? “So think about that. If that was something people would say, that shows you how women were viewed. That sort of stuff, it’s just mind-blowing.”

Why Cillian moved his family back to Ireland after living in London for years: “People ask me that question a lot, and I’m sure it’s the same for you. We came back for reasons that were about the kids and being near their grandparents. About having a quieter life. We weren’t motivated by politics or what’s happening socially in Ireland. We left pre-Brexit, actually. It was good timing. It worked out. It feels like an Irish story. You move away and you learn about yourself. You find yourself in London or New York. You do what you want to do and then you come home. It seems to be just a very common Irish narrative.” But it wasn’t always that common. “Oh, yeah. In the world of this movie all the young people are leaving, and they ain’t coming back.”

[From The Irish Times]

Some of what Murphy speaks about is incredibly recent – abortion wasn’t legalized in Ireland until 2018. Divorce wasn’t allowed/legalized until 1995. It was 1985 before regular people could buy condoms without a prescription. I had never heard of the Kerry Babies, but I looked it up and it’s a horrific story. All of it has happened within Cillian’s lifetime and he’s not that old.

Anyway, this interview got a lot of attention when the Irish Pro Life Campaign made a big statement slamming Cillian for… supporting abortion and reproductive choice. It’s just as crazy as the anti-choice sh-t we get here in America – you would think that the Irish anti-choice campaigns would actually sit back and say “you know what, given the Church’s catastrophic history in Ireland, we should just shut our mouths.”

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.

Cillian Murphy covers GQ as part of his Oscar campaign, and this is arguably the most thorough interview I’ve read with him during the entire Oppenheimer promotion and campaign. He’s reflective and relaxed, mostly because he’s being interviewed in his small Irish village where he knows everyone and everyone knows him. It’s been a long-standing joke that Cillian hates every part of Oscar season, but the truth is probably that Cillian sees it as part of his job and he’s grateful for the opportunity, but no, he doesn’t enjoy all of this stuff. He tolerates it and doesn’t complain too much. This interview is very Irish and I enjoyed it! Some highlights:

His quiet life in Ireland with two teenage sons: “I have a couple of friends who are actors but a majority of them are not. The majority of my buddies are not in the business. I also love not working. And I think for me a lot of research as an actor is just f–king living, and, you know, having a normal life doing regular things and just being able to observe, and be, in that sort of lovely flow of humanity. If you can’t do that because you’re going from film festival to movie set to promotions…I mean that’s The Bubble. I’m not saying that makes you any better or less as an actor, but it’s just a world that I couldn’t exist in. I find it would be very limiting on what you can experience as a human being, you know?”

He loves to sleep: “I sleep a lot. I do 10-hour sleeps.” He tries to do one movie a year, preferably not in summer, when he likes to spend most of his time on the west coast of Ireland doing nothing much but finding new music for his radio program on BBC 6 or walking his black Lab, Scout. He is perfectly happy to be “unemployed” while he waits for the right new film to come his way.

He was relieved to cut short the Oppy promotion because of the SAG strike: “I think it’s a broken model,” he said of red-carpet interviews and junkets. Outdated and a drag for actors. “The model is—everybody is so bored.” Look what happened when they went on strike, he said. It all stopped. But the fact that the film was good, and Barbie was good, two at the same time, people going crazy—it just shows you don’t need it. “Same was the case with Peaky Blinders. The first three seasons there was no advertising, a tiny show on BBC Two; it just caught fire because people talked to each other about it. It’s like Joanne Woodward said. ‘Acting is like sex—do it, don’t talk about it.’ ”

He actually loves talking about the work: “People always used to say to me, ‘He has reservations’ or ‘He’s a difficult interviewee.’ Not really! I love talking about work, about art. What I struggle with, and find unnecessary, and unhelpful about what I want to do, is: ‘Tell me about yourself…’ ”

His life changed in August 1996: “It all happened to me in one month, in August ’96: We got offered a record deal, I failed my law exams, I got the part in Disco Pigs, and I met my wife. I now look back and go: Oh, shit, I didn’t know then how important all these things were—the sort of domino effect that they would have on my life.” I asked Murphy, who has, in the past, said he identified as an atheist, if such a confluence ever made him wonder if there was indeed a higher power organizing all of this. “Ohhh,” he said. “I love the chaos and the randomness. I love the beauty of the unexpected.”

He doesn’t do photos with fans: “Oh, I don’t do photos,” he said, to a disappointed lad, who nonetheless got 20 seconds of Murphy’s time to chat. “Once I started doing that it changed my life. I just think it’s better to say hello, and have a little conversation. I tell that to a lot of people, you know, actor friends of mine, and they’re just like: I feel so bad. But you don’t need a photo record of everywhere you’ve been in a day.”

He loves Paul Mescal. “He is the real deal. He is like a true movie star. They don’t come along that often. But luckily, they seem mostly to come from Ireland. It’s a good time to be an Irish actor, it seems.”

He admires Nolan, who doesn’t use email or have a smartphone. “I aspire to that life. I was just clearing stuff off my phone, but have to keep the apps for music and music discovery. I still have all my CDs and DVDs and Blu-Rays. I cannot get rid of them. I did get rid of my VHS, though. I just left them on the street because nobody wanted them. I went and brought them to a library and was like, Look at this pretentious collection of art films!—and they were like, No thanks, man…”

[From GQ]

I still have DVDs too and I’m not giving them up for anything. Maybe that’s dated and impossibly analog but I have collected physical media all my life and I will not stop! I still have CDs as well but mostly because I’m a pack rat. That’s interesting that he also doesn’t do fan photos but he’ll have a conversation with fans. It’s probably easier to do in Ireland. It’s fascinating to hear him talk about how the promotion/junket model is broken too – I think it is as well, but I’m curious what Cillian thinks should replace it. I would say… more sit-down interviews (like this one) ahead of time and then just a regular premiere schedule within a two-week period, maybe with press conferences (like they do at film festivals).

Cover & IG courtesy of GQ.