Cillian Murphy: revisit the Oscar winner’s 2006 Dazed cover shoot

Welcome to the Archive Pull, a new series delving into the 30-year history of our print magazine. To celebrate his Best Actor win at the 2024 Academy Awards, we look back at Cillian Murphy’s cover profile, originally published in the January 2006 issue of Dazed & Confused.

Listen to Cillian Murphy for too long, and he will have you believing that luck has brought him here today. “A lot of it’s coincidence,” he says, sitting in a Kentish Town photo studio at the crack of dawn on a Saturday. He’s talking about the films that have put him third on a Hollywood Insider magazine’s list of breakthrough actors in 2005. Take 28 Days Later, the low-fi zombie flick which has probably done more for his career than any other movie. “We were really lucky, because it was a low budget movie that made a lot of money,” he explains. Or the new Ken Loach feature he’s just finished. “Ken just happened to be shooting a film about Cork, which is where I’m from.” In an industry that trades on phoney talk, a pleasantly reticent Cillian Murphy will explain away his golden touch with 101 reasons. “If someone had told me a few years ago the names of the directors I would have worked with, I’d have laughed.”

Last year, Cillian Murphy played a couple of hiss boo baddies in smart studio movies Batman Begins and Wes Craven’s Red Eye. Next up, we’ll see him in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto, playing lost soul Patrick “Kitten” Braden. We are first introduced to Patrick as a small boy in the late 60s, stealing pretties off washing lines, dressing like a girl and dreaming about the mother who abandoned him as a baby. As a teenager, Patrick morphs into Kitten, his female alter ego, who quits Ireland and gallivants around London in search of her missing matriarch. The film’s themes – the troubles and boys who want to be girls, are old ground for Jordan who directed The Crying Game. And with Kitten, there is that same blurry line of fantasy that kept Holly Golightly just on the right side of prostitution. Like her, Kitten trades on her charms and the kindness of strangers. Her bloody-minded sweetness is shared by this genre-bending film, in which animated robins straight out of Snow White narrate the opening and close.

Cillian Murphy sits drinking coffee, pondering the loopiness that is Breakfast on Pluto. Since he finished filming, he’s made two further movies, the Ken Loach drama, and a futuristic sci-fi with Danny Boyle. “This film is not about the loss of innocence,” he says. “Kitty keeps her innocence. Normally, characters travel from A to Z in a film, developing and changing as they go, but here other people change because of her.”

Cillian Murphy was a 20-year-old law student who had been playing in bands for years – “some good, some bad” – when he was offered a record deal. He turned it down. At around the same time he accepted his first acting role, in a play called Disco Pigs. “I was lucky that they decided to cast unknowns,” he says. There it is again, luck. The play was a hit, went on tour, and was later made into a film, in which he also starred. Since then Murphy has appeared in Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and of course, 28 Days Later. They are performances striking for their openness, whether a lovelorn butcher or luckless soldier. But off-screen, he doesn’t give much away. And why should he? Murphy recently married his long-term girlfriend, but mentions her only to say that he wore her eyeliner for his audition for Breakfast on Pluto. His friends are mostly the same as when he was at college. He still makes music, but baulks at the idea of “being one of those actors in a band.” Murphy, it seems, is too smart to be typecast.

He read Pat McCabe’s novel Breakfast on Pluto, which was nominated for the Booker Prize, when he was 16. A few years ago, when he discovered Neil Jordan had the script, Murphy bugged the director to make the film. “I’m 29, and can still pull off younger characters, but not for much longer.” It’s easy to see why Jordan could have been ambivalent. Cross-dressing in movies makes us laugh – jutty-out elbows and pigeon-toed walks in Tootsie or Some Like it Hot. But Murphy’s transformation in this film is not at all draggy, but “feminine rather than effeminate”. In person, Murphy has the kind of jawbone that could have made it onto black and white posters in the 80s. The change we see onscreen is profound. “The make-up artist was amazing and the cameraman was really sympathetic and sensitive,” he says by way of explanation. His Bolan-esque image was inspired by old copies of Vogue, and he even had his hair permed. He also went on a couple of outings to gay clubs in Soho. “As a straight man it was really strange to infiltrate that culture,” he says. “It was mad, but very protective once you were accepted.”

“After [28 Days Later], I was sent a lot of scripts, a lot of shite – teen movies, horrors, movies that are probably great if you’re 20” – Cillian Murphy

Kitten is a world away from the creepy misfits we saw him play last year – the demented psychiatrist in Batman Begins and demon assassin in Wes Craven’s Red Eye. His choice of roles prompted one magazine to compare him to Robert Mitchum, whose psychotic preacher in Night of the Hunter wrote the template. But if Murphy’s roles share one common trait, it is that they are all characters on the edge. None more so than Murphy’s bicycle courier in 28 Days Later, who wakes up from a coma to the silence of a new world. This wasn’t Tom Hanks doing a UPS guy, and his performance – showing his inadequacies and vanities – was gripping. In 2002, the film took $40 million in the US, and was, for a while, the most talked about film by people who talk about films. “In some way it seemed to have a cultural impact on a lot of people,” Murphy says. It was also a career-making film for him. “It made a lot of money, which in America means that a lot of people sit up and listen. It doesn’t necessarily mean a film is good, but I think that in this case it was. After that, I was sent a lot of scripts, a lot of shite – teen movies, horrors, movies that are probably great if you’re 20.”

All of which couldn’t be further from Kitten and Breakfast on Pluto. She lives in a fabulous fantasy world after running away from home with a no-mark rock singer. Playing Cher to his Sonny, things are dandy for Kitten until she has a run in with the IRA, decommissioning a stockpile of weapons by throwing them into a lake. In Jordan’s hands you might expect bullets to the back of the knees at this point. This is the director who gave us The Crying Game, a violent noir in which Stephen Rea’s Provo kills a soldier and falls for his girlfriend, only to discover later that she is a he. In this film, Kitten’s dottiness puts them off the task at hand and she is freed. Later in London, she is arrested as a terrorist suspect, and is impervious to the blows and bully boy tactics of the police. Kitten demands to stay at the police station: “I just want to belong”. Even a corrupt cop is transformed into a fairy godmother, taking Kitten to a Soho strip club where she is taken care of. These are some of the best and funniest scenes in the film, and are, perhaps, a sign of the times too. We don’t need to be told that the IRA were, and probably still are, thugs, or that our own British bobbies were not, and probably still are not, above strong-arm tactics. Cillian Murphy likes these scenes too. “I love the one in which the police kick the shit out of me, and then the officer becomes my protector. It’s Neil’s way of flipping things.”

“I have never done a picture where I’ve thought afterwards, ‘don’t fucking bring that up’. There’s not one film l’ve done half-heartedly” – Cillian Murphy

Murphy says he has no interest in making movies that middle America will send their kids to watch. He has just started work on another film with Danny Boyle, about a team of astronauts on a mission to reignite a dying part of the sun. Before that, he was filming with Ken Loach on a film about the Irish Civil War, which killed more people in 1922 than the struggle for independence before it. “Ken was only hiring actors from Cork,” Murphy explains. “I had something like six auditions with him.” Such is the director’s quest for verité that you can imagine the actor having to work twice as hard to convince Loach that he could do the job as well as a non-professional. It’s the film that Murphy seems most excited about. “I dropped everything for the chance to work with Ken,” he says. His life during filming suited Loach’s low-key style, living at home with his parents in Cork, turning up on set every morning alongside a mostly amateur cast. The director’s process is all his own; he doesn’t give actors scripts or storylines so they have no idea whether their character will live or die from one day to the next. “The result is a completely honest performance. You might be appalling or embarrassing, but you have no control over it.” There are also some cracking battle scenes, all of which might disappoint the middle Americans who sent their kids to see Craven’s fright-fest Red Eye. “I have never done a picture where I’ve thought afterwards, ‘don’t fucking bring that up’. There’s not one film l’ve done half-heartedly.”

Hair GARETH VAN CUYLENBERG at JULIAN WATSON AGENCY, photographic assistants DARREN SLEEBUSH, JAMES DEAKINS, styling assistant ROBBIE SPENCER, retouching JUSTINE at HENHOUSE, with thanks to MARK LOY at SPRING STUDIO, calligraphy EUAN MACGREGOR