“Easily my best experience”: The movie Cillian Murphy called beautiful
Cillian Murphy has picked his projects carefully, honing one of the most high-quality filmographies amongst his peers. From an early starring role in the horror classic 28 Days Later to his most recent Academy Award-winning outing as Oppenheimer, the Irish actor has always had a grasp on great cinema, often finding it in particularly intense stories and shoots.
Between his long-standing collaborative relationship with Christopher Nolan and his penchant for historical dramas, Murphy has found himself in some particularly extreme and exhausting shooting environments. His role as a shivering soldier in Dunkirk involved acting surrounded by explosions and countless extras, while Oppenheimer required him to delve into the destruction of nuclear warfare.
Outside of the silver screen, too, Murphy has embarked upon some particularly intense projects. He spent almost a decade embodying the character of Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders, an experience that proved to be particularly tiring for the actor. As he ventured to Birmingham to delve into all the crimes and complexities in Steven Knight’s scripts, he created one of the most iconic characters in British television, but he also wore himself down.
It’s no surprise, then, that Murphy looks back fondly on the opportunity to shoot a little closer to home while working on Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Released in 2006, the project was consistent with Murphy’s cinematic interests, finding its setting and story amidst the Irish War of Independence. Despite the weight of the film, Murphy found the shoot to be one of the most comfortable of his career.
While reflecting on the project during a conversation with The Guardian, Murphy called it a “beautiful shoot” and deemed it “easily [his] best experience in terms of the process of acting.” He explained that the film was shot over the summer in Cork, the city where he was born, where he grew up and even where he attended university.
The shooting location allowed Murphy to live at home with his parents, and enabled him to be around for his wife, who was pregnant at the time. In comparison to the intense hotel stays he embarked upon in the midlands for Peaky Blinders, and to shooting in Dunkirk for the film of the same name, it’s easy to see why Murphy found this to be one of his greatest experiences on set.
Since the release of The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Murphy has become far more well known as Tommy Shelby and as Nolan’s go-to leading man, but he has also continued to make space for films set in his home country. Amidst appearances in the Dark Knight trilogy and other big action films, he also appeared in a number of Irish comedies which allowed him to shoot slightly closer to home.
Fresh off the success of Oppenheimer, his upcoming project, Small Things like These, sees him return to the realm of Irish history. Though it wasn’t shot quite as close to the town he grew up in, it was filmed in County Wicklow, just a couple of hours to the northeast of Cork.
Though he may be one of the biggest names in Hollywood, Murphy’s best experience on set was much closer to home, and it seems that he’s committed to returning as much as he can. As he flits between huge blockbusters and tales of Irish history, Murphy is curating one of the most carefully considered catalogues in cinema.
