Cillian Murphy: ‘In Ireland, slagging someone off is the deepest form of affection’

Rather than bask in the glow of his Oscar win, the Oppenheimer star went straight back to work – uncovering unsettling secrets close to home

Like anybody tasked with interviewing Cillian Murphy, I prepare by reading about his eyes. According to Matt Damon, you “find yourself swimming” in them. Christopher Nolan calls them “crazy”. Donatella Versace finds them “mesmerising”. One critic claimed that describing them would require “a thesaurus that does not yet exist”. The playwright Enda Walsh has complained of “those bloody eyes everyone’s going on about”. Cerulean, azure, cobalt – which version will loom from Zoom? 
None, it transpires. “Do you mind if we keep the cameras off and have an old-fashioned chat?” comes the soft Cork voice through a black screen. It is a Sunday morning and Murphy, 48, is in Manchester, where he has been shooting the upcoming Peaky Blinders film. “We’ve been on three weeks of these brutal night shoots and I just rolled out of the scratcher,” he says (which I quickly google to check that it means “bed” in Ireland). “I’m still in my pyjamas.” What kind of pyjamas? “Comfortable yet conservative.” The reader will have to imagine Murphy, clutching his coffee, talking into his computer.
Since his breakthrough in the early 2000s, Murphy has spent two decades engaged in two pursuits. On the one hand, he became one of the most respected film stars of his generation, equally comfortable with small budgets (The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Anthropoid, 28 Days Later) as massive ones (Sunshine, Dunkirk, Inception). And as the murderous but moral Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders, Murphy created one of the most memorable TV characters of the 21st century, a face that launched a million terrible imitative haircuts.
On the other, Murphy gave every impression of loathing the circus: the selfie requests and silly interviews that come with being famous. He was perfectly polite, funny and self-effacing – but completely resistant to anything that attempted to probe the real man. 
That all changed last summer, when his turn as the father of the atomic bomb in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer launched him into another galaxy. The film took close to a billion dollars at the box office. And Murphy took the Golden Globe, the Bafta, the Screen Actors Guild and the Oscar for Best Actor, among other awards (including a special mention from the Alliance of Women Film Journalists for Most Egregious Lovers’ Age Difference for his on-screen fling with Florence Pugh, 28).
“None of us could have predicted what would happen,” he says of Oppenheimer’s triumph. “I knew it was one of the best scripts I’ve ever read, but we were aware we were making a three-hour biopic about a physicist. It was a confluence of events, an extraordinary thing to be involved with, and really heartening that so many went to see it.” 
If Murphy’s captivating performance came as little surprise to his fans, it was shocking to see him enjoying the press attention, or at least making a fair job at pretending to. He appeared on endless red carpets, in endless tuxedos, to press endless flesh and answer the same questions endless times. His bemused face was widely memed. 
“I think you can decide to enjoy something,” he says. “If you went into that with any cynicism or ­feeling like you didn’t want to be there, it would be very unpleasant. I chose to enjoy it, my family were there, we were surrounded by lovely people, Emily [Blunt] and [Robert] Downey [Jr]. 
“It was amazing meeting all these amazing artists socially, all the time. Casually bumping into Martin Scorsese, people whose work has changed your life, and being reassured that everyone finds it just as bizarre.” Did Marty tap him up for the next project? “No, that was the extent of our interactions,” he laughs. “A hello and talking about the canapés or whatever.” 
“There was a lot of healthy slagging [off], too, by the way,” he adds, lest he come across as too incorrig­ible a luvvie. “In Ireland, slagging is one of the deepest forms of affection. On the day of the Oscars, my best friend and brother flew out as a surprise. They did an intense amount of slagging.” If your best friend can’t give you a hard time when you win an Oscar and front a Ver­s­ace campaign, I suggest, something has gone badly wrong. “Absolutely,” he laughs. “It’s a fair target.” 
Rather than dwell on an extraordinary few months, Murphy headed back on set. 
“I haven’t properly reflected on it all,” he says. “I went straight back to work. I don’t know if that was the correct thing to do or not, but I did.” He knew the Peaky film was coming; there were also two book adaptations in which he was involved as a producer and actor. Steve, a Net­flix adaptation of Max Porter’s novella Shy, finished filming in July. More immediately, there is Small Things Like These, an adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Orwell Prize-­winning 2021 novel. 
It’s hard to imagine a more drastic counterpoint to a billion-dollar blockbuster: a patient, unsettling film about Ireland’s Magdalene asylums, the religious institutions to which 56,000 “fallen women” – sex workers, single mothers, pregnant out of wedlock – were sent between 1922 and 1996 for “pen­ance and rehabilitation”. The film takes place over a few days at Christmas 1985 in New Ross, Co Wex­ford. Murphy plays Bill Furlong, a successful coalman who uncovers terrible abuse at his local asy­lum at a time when he is reckoning with his own unhappy childhood. 
It was produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, through their new company Artists Equity, after ­Murphy pitched to Damon on the Oppenheimer set. 
“We were sitting in the night in the middle of the desert,” he recalls. “We were waiting for rain, or for the rain to stop. Matt Damon is one of my heroes. He told me about his new company and how they were looking for material. I said I happened to have a script I was developing, a small little film about this very specific and difficult period in Irish history. I said, ‘Think of it like Manchester by the Sea meets Doubt.’ He got it immediately.” 
There are overlaps with Oppenheimer. In between the long speeches about isotopes, Nolan used Murphy’s face as a landscape, etching the grief, self-loathing and pride that came to the physicist for creating such an awesome and ­terrible weapon. In Small Things, Furlong must weigh his disquiet against the malign power of the Church, which he hopes will educate his five daughters.
“The sort of acting that’s always appealed to me is when the actor can project non-verbally what they’re feeling,” he says. “I’ve always cut my own lines, to try and do it with as little as possible. Oppenheimer was an incredibly verbose film. But with Small Things, he was that sort of Irishman who was quite monosyllabic and reserved, and we meet him at a point in his life when he is going through something emotional and quite profound. These deep-thinking Irish­men are probably less common nowadays, but I remember them from my childhood. Without going too deep, the country had been oppressed for a long time. I think it was James Joyce who said we were colonised once by the English and once by the Church. It’s probably fair. It was a difficult time to be an individual during that period when the Catholic Church had a very tight hold on its morals and the inner workings of human beings.”  
The film reunites Murphy with Enda Walsh, who wrote the script. Walsh gave Murphy his first break with Disco Pigs, a play – later a film – that hauled Murphy out of a law deg­ree, after a promising earlier car­eer in a jazz-rock band. And Walsh is one of several collaborators – Christopher Nolan, Steven Knight, Danny Boyle – to whom Murphy has returned. “I didn’t know Enda was going to be this generational writer,” he says. “He was just this guy that had great hair.
“But the glue with all these recollaborations is trust. For an actor, vulnerability is your superpower. It’s harder to do that in a room full of strangers. But in a room of people you’ve known for a long time, you can be as raw as you need to be. That’s what I like to try to achieve, but you have to have the right register. I need to be around friends. I believe the camera or audience can read any tension or holding back in the mind of the actor.” 
The Peaky Blinders film is the final leg of another long, happy collaboration, which began in 2012. The original show was not necessarily the most promising pitch: a highly stylised depiction of a hard-living Brummie gang in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet it found a vast audience, for reasons that still aren’t clear even to him. 
“No one knows the answer, really,” Murphy says. “Audiences love gangsters, and there really hadn’t been a proper English gangster show. And there hadn’t been a proper show about working-class people between the wars. And then because it had its own culture, the language and accent and costuming and music and haircuts. It was original. Probably being on Netflix helped. We didn’t have any advertising at the start, so it was owned by the fans.” 
Once Peaky finishes, he will head home for a rest. With his wife, the artist Yvonne McGuinness and their teenage sons, Malachy and Aran, Murphy moved to Monkstown, Dublin, in 2015, after 14 years in London. This was not, he says, for fear of the boys having “very posh English accents”.   
“I think I said that on an American podcast in a sarcastic manner and it became a headline,” he says. “It’s ridiculous. I was making a joke! That’s not the main reason we moved home. Irish people tend to have a bit of a dry sense of humour and it doesn’t always translate.” 
Aran, 17, has shown promise as an actor; in 2025, he will appear in an adaptation of Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. 
“It may not be the thing he does, but he’s really good at it,” he says. “One of my friends saw him in a play and said, ‘Cill, he’s better looking, he’s a better actor, he’s younger and he’s taller. You’re f—ed.’ We’ll see. People are smart enough to judge you on your talent. There’s no way any kid will get by on nepotism alone. Everyone in this business gets found out unless they’re good, and he’s a good little actor. But we’re not putting him under any pressure. If he decides to become a musician or a poet or a farmer or a chef, that’s up to him.” 
Meanwhile, Murphy is not revealing any further plans – not even what part Nolan has surely lined up for him in his next film. 
“Honestly, I just want to have a rest,” he says. “I really enjoy being at home and not working. I enjoy going to the shop and walking the dog and watching movies. I haven’t been able to do that at all. My ­creative output gets used up very quickly. I think you need to live as a human being to portray a human being. The life I lived for part of this year was definitely not reality.” 
Back to his scratcher, then, for a bit of well-earned shut-eye.
Small Things Like These is in cinemas from Friday