There is a lot going on with Cillian Murphy, a man whose mind always seems to be somewhere else. The actor sits in front of me brooding under that flop of dark fringe, cheekbones like smooth marble. When he smiles his blue eyes seem to ignite. Close up over coffee in London that peerless skill of his becomes clear: he has a remarkably expressive face, able to twitch a nerve and make a viewer whoop or weep. Murphy is the iceberg of actors — you have no idea how deep he goes.
We meet when he is working various rooms on a promo trip to England but he is always thinking about home — the Dublin suburbs where he lives with his wife, Yvonne, and sons, Malachy, 20, and Aran, 18. “By the time I get back on set it will have been 15 months since I last worked,” the 49-year-old says with a laugh. “Most of the time? I’m at home, walking the dog.”
He pauses and continues wistfully: “Middle age is really interesting. You’ve had children and been successful and then hit this certain age and think, all right, this is the first time I’ve got less time left than I’ve had so far on this planet. I’m turning 50 in a few months, so I do think, well, what do I do now? Hopefully I can just be a reasonable dad and husband, and then, when it comes, still take the work incredibly seriously.”
Murphy is old-school. A lot of actors I meet spout opinions on everything, but him? He is a throwback to the days when it was acting first with no idea what Instagram is. From his breakthrough in 2002, waking up from a coma in the middle of a zombie problem in 28 Days Later, to last year’s excellent Steve, in which Murphy played a teacher struggling to contain a borstal, he is remarkably light on duds. His Oscar-winning role as the lead in Oppenheimer (2023) was his zenith — who better to convey the toil of becoming a destroyer of worlds? But he is the best thing in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) too, his smallish role as the shell-shocked soldier carrying the film’s emotion.
And I have not even mentioned Tommy Shelby, Murphy’s role in the television series Peaky Blinders that will probably wind up being the defining one of his career. Created by Steven Knight, the mob show set in Birmingham began in 2013 and over its six series became a cultural phenomenon. It now has its first film, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, with Barry Keoghan joining the cast as Shelby’s son.
Timeline-wise, the Shelbys are now in the Second World War, with the Nazis teaming up with gangsters to try to crash the British economy. Believe it or not, Tommy is more messed up than usual, grieving his daughter alone in a country pile before family ties draw him back to Brum.
There are nearly 37 hours of Peaky Blinders on TV — adding up to almost 40 when you chuck in the movie. Unless people watch the three-hour Oppenheimer at least 12 times — “Which people did!” Murphy interrupts — there is nothing else that comes close to offering this much Murphy.
“I was 35 when we started and 48 when we made the film,” he says. “I’ve played Tommy for over a quarter of my life, moving from being a youngish man right into the teeth of middle age. It’s incredibly rewarding seeing everybody around you get older.”
I mention Helen McCrory, who played Tommy’s aunt Polly before the actress died of cancer in 2021. She is honoured rather beautifully in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. Murphy says series six carried the “most acute sense” of her death because McCrory should have been in those episodes, only for Covid to postpone shooting until it was too late. “A dear friend,” the actor says. “But that is one of the consequences of doing something for such a long time. We lost Helen… people had babies, got married. People changed their lives.”
When Peaky Blinders started it was commissioned for one series on BBC2 at a time when US long-form TV was in its imperial phase and everybody in Britain was, well, watching US long-form TV. The confident, fully realised Peaky Blinders changed that, but only because it rewarded patience. “It wasn’t an instant hit,” Murphy says. “People thought that it was OK but its second series was when it really clicked and people are still discovering it. A film will come and be hot or not and then it’s gone. But TV? It’s like a novel — people find it.”
David Bowie was a fan and there’s a spin-off ballet and video games. You can even go on an immersive evening out in Dudley wearing flat caps with a grade-one back and sides. There’s the fashion label Shelby Brothers. Branded whisky. Apart from the American series Stranger Things, it is hard to think of a TV show that has burst this far out of the box; violence fetishised, brutal men turned into weekend role playing. “Weddings! Full back tattoos!” Murphy exclaims, listing the esoteric things that have been inspired by the show. Why has it struck such a chord?
“Well, it’s hard to fathom, but there are all sorts of reasons to relate — clothes, music [the Nick Cave theme tune, Fontaines DC] and the fact it is family and everyone comes from a family, right?” he says. “But then it’s very heightened, so it’s like when I first saw Travis Bickle.”
He watched Robert De Niro’s menacing vigilante in Taxi Driver at an impressionable 15. “He became imprinted on my brain — such a complex character morally but the performance is searing and I’m not comparing myself to De Niro. Please put that in the piece… but I have a beautiful book on the film signed by him. I can understand obsession.”
Murphy was born in Cork on May 25, 1976 — one of four siblings to parents who worked in education. As a child he wanted to be in a band and started to write songs when he was ten, even turning down a record deal for his Frank Zappa-inspired group the Sons of Mr Green Genes. “I’m a frustrated musician,” he says shrugging, adding that if cast in the upcoming Beatles biopic, he could only play “a weird middle-age fan”, seeing as he is too hooked on the band to play an actual Beatle.
He loved the “electricity” of playing live and chased theatre for that fix in his early acting career, his head having been turned by a stage production of A Clockwork Orange — but I think he’s carried through the frontman’s edge to screen as well. Musicians are weirder than actors, more internal and wired, and that is Murphy to a tee. From the murky coming-of-age drama Disco Pigs (2001) to Oppenheimer, he has played men who, like himself, seem made up of hinterland.
Does he seek out these difficult men? “I respond to the fallibility of everyone and the fact most people are trying to do the right thing,” Murphy says. “That is the struggle of being alive and it sounds really pretentious, but in Oppenheimer he had to work out how to rationalise the fact that he was the father of the atomic bomb yet still get up in the morning to put his f***ing shoes on. In that struggle there is great drama but everyone walks around in that contradictory way of living. Most of us are struggling to be good but just get derailed, make mistakes, before getting back on course.”
Has his faith in the goodness of people wavered the more chaotic the world has become? “It is just that the screen’s been pulled back,” Murphy says rationally, “licence given to articulate thoughts that used to be kept locked away. But these thoughts were always there. It’s just that there are now communities where people can go to have those feelings validated. It’s more transparent.”
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is, I say, the first film I’ve seen with Nazis for baddies during an era where, especially on social media, people like the political commentator Nick Fuentes are openly saying they are aligned with the Nazis.
“That’s profoundly upsetting,” Murphy says. “But then this film wears that lightly — it’s not The Zone of Interest, let’s put it that way. And, look, the last thing I want to be involved in is preachy or dogmatic work because films should never tell you how to feel. They should just ask questions. This should be an entertaining action film with a big heart, but if you want to look closer it could be provocative too. The best mainstream entertainment operates simultaneously on those levels.”
Did Oppenheimer? “Similar,” Murphy says. “If you want to talk about where we are in the world and look at how close we are to nuclear f***ing Armageddon, you can think about Oppenheimer in that way, but if you just want to look at a great film with big explosions then that’s cool as well.”
He calls Nolan a master of this type of layered cinema and puts Danny Boyle in the bracket too — the director who cast Murphy in 28 Days Later after the eager actor, who had Trainspotting posters on his wall, auditioned five times. This year Murphy’s Jim returned to the franchise in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, with a sequel in the planning stages. Will it happen? “Hope so! I’m ready anyway.”
And what of the rumours that the one-time Voldemort, Ralph Fiennes, spread that Murphy is taking on the role of the evil one for the new Harry Potter TV show? “I’m categorically not,” Murphy scoffs. “Can you make that the headline?”
He laughs, slightly manically – a man who seems so off-grid that he was not even aware of the swirling Harry Potter rumours about himself. “Being a personality is not what I am good at,” he says, laughing, thinking about all the fuss that goes on in and around the actual acting. “But then existing in this world? Talking about yourself, going on f***ing red carpets? It’s not healthy if you start to believe this shit, and I’m really bad at it too.” He smiles modestly, as he gets ready to head back home. “I’m an incredibly average person, really.”
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in selected cinemas from Mar 6 and on Netflix from Mar 20
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