Interview: Cillian Murphy

Marcello Paolillo met with helmer Neil Jordan and actors Cillian Murphy and Stephen Rea in New York.

Q: How did you prepare for the role? Neil Jordan told us that he wasn’t concerned at all about how you would look like in the film.

A: Did he say that? I don’t think so! He had a very clear vision of how he wanted the character, and I love to work with a director who has a vision. But I agree with him that the drag aspect wasn’t the main issue. I wanted Kitten to be feminine rather than effeminate. It’s easy to play a campy queen, but I wanted to look genuinely feminine, with no affectation. That was our goal. Of course, I hung out in London at night clubs dressed like Kitten meeting amazing, beautiful people. They were very protective and I realized why that is: because you get so easily shouted on the street! And I did get catcalls. But again, the transformation was easy. I knew I could act in drag, the real question was to find the soul of the character, the beautiful goodness and innocence of Kitten.

Q: Kitten knows since the beginning who she is, even though she created her own identity. As an actor, can you relate to that?

A: It’s very unusual for a character to remain the same throughout the whole film. Usually there is a very clear dramatic arc for a character, but Kitten is unique: she is always the same while everything else around her changes as a result of it. She has a very “Candide” aspect. She represents the misfits in all of us who love too easy and trust too easy and get hurt too easy. But I am not like her. I am not that strong at all. She is very, very strong.

Q: The naïveté of Kitten is quite beautiful. At the same time, do you think that her philosophy of “just having fun” in a world that takes itself too seriously and is so full of tragedy can be accused of disengagement?

A: Not at all. She is always perfectly aware of what’s going on in the north of Ireland. She uses her naïveté as a defense mechanism to deal with the pain and the brutality of the situation. But in doing so, she also highlights the absurdity of it.

Q: It’s funny that in this film you are so harmless and innocent, but you have just become very famous to the American audience for two very evil roles in Batman Begins and Red Eye.

A: I know, but I can’t control how films get distributed. I actually did Pluto in the middle. But then again, can you really plan your career? I just look for good roles and good performances.

Q: Still you’ve been in two of this summer’s biggest blockbusters. Has this changed your life in a way?

A: Not really, because I’ve been working all the time during the last months. I wasn’t even at the press junket for Batman Begins, I was shooting during those days. Besides, that is really Christian Bale’s movie. And when you have Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Liam Neeson, do you think anybody wants to talk with me? But I can tell you that I put my soul in Breakfast On Pluto. Kitten was such an incredibly challenging character. Besides, I was a fan of Jordan and McCabe before I even became an actor. Butcher Boy was one of my favorite films and books. It was a big part of my life.

Q: After 28 Days Later, you are back to work with Danny Boyle in his upcoming sci-fi pic Sunshine [freely inspired by Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, this is set 50 years into the future when the sun is dying. Man’s last hope lies with a heroic group of eight astronauts and scientists aboard the spaceship Icarus II charged with delivering a stellar fission bomb into the heart of the sun]

A: If a collaboration worked so well in the past, why not do it again? Look at Stephen Rea, who has been working with Neil Jordan for decades! I feel a short-hand, a confidence and an understanding between me and Danny Boyle, so I was delighted to be back working with him and people like Alex Garland and Andrew Macdonald [screenwriter and producer of both 28 Days Later and Sunshine]. But the two projects are completely different. 28 Days Later was a low budget horror film, while this is a big science fiction story with space suits and stuff!

Q: You are also in the new Ken Loach movie, The Wind That Shakes the Barley

A: It’s again a political film [and curiously again the title is taken from a song, like Breakfast On Pluto and The Crying Game]. It revolves around a family and the Irish guerrilla units that fought the British between 1919 and 1921. It’s about the Anglo-Irish war and the subsequent Civil War that shaped the country. Two brothers join the guerrilla armies, and I play one of two brothers. But I haven’t seen anything yet. Ken Loach never shows you anything! I didn’t even know if I had been in the movie until the end!

Sony Pictures Classics’ Breakfast on Pluto opens exclusively in New York on the Wednesday the 16th and will open wider in the weeks to come.

You can also read Marcello’s interviews with director Neil Jordan & actor Stephen Rea.