An Oscar changes everything for most actors. Not Cillian Murphy

Having an Oscar, says Cillian Murphy, hasn’t really changed anything for him. Two weeks after the ceremony in 2024, where he was named best actor for his lead performance in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, he was back on a film set. The previous year, he says, he had done more publicity than he had done in the previous 28 years.

“I also did two films, which I rarely do.” Now he was back working with good mates, taking the dog for long walks over the Kerry hills and being a dad to two teenagers: everything was normal. “Nothing is different. That’s genuine. I’m not just saying that.”

“Nothing is different”: Cillian Murphy with his Best Actor Oscar for Oppenheimer.Credit: AP

Before Oppenheimer, Murphy was probably most recognised as that bloke in Peaky Blinders, the BBC/Netflix gangster series set in 1920s Birmingham whose legions of fans love everything about it, from the theme song to the haircuts to the characters, not just the blue-eyed ringleader. Hard-core, Oscar-style stardom crept up on Murphy slowly, much to his retrospective relief. He says he couldn’t have faced it when he was younger.

Murphy grew up in Cork, a lively city in Ireland’s south-west. Both his parents were teachers. In his teens, all he wanted to do was play in a band; even now, he will “do anything that involves music … even just making mix tapes or making radio shows”, as he told the Financial Times. “It’s a primal thing.”

Cillian Murphy and Elaine Cassidy in Disco Pigs.

It was the same urge that led him to badger a local theatre director to give him an audition when he was supposed to be studying law. The director was persuaded. Murphy got a part and was away to the arts, never to look back.

At 19, he was cast in Disco Pigs, a vivid two-hander about a childhood friendship by Enda Walsh – another energetic Cork lad, just 10 years older than him – which toured the world and was then turned into a film in 2001. They are still best of friends; Walsh wrote the script for Small Things Like These, Murphy’s latest film, based on Claire Keegan’s Booker-shortlisted novel. Eileen Walsh, his stage partner in Disco Pigs all those years ago, plays his wife in this film.

Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh in Small Things Like These. Credit: Enda Bowe/Lionsgate

That’s how Murphy likes to work – and one reason he has made six films with Christopher Nolan, including three Batmans and Oppenheimer. The new film is directed by Tim Mielants, a Belgian director who worked on Peaky Blinders. “If you trust somebody, you can really go straight to the work and be vulnerable and really try things out,” Murphy says. “I think a lot of my work has been re-collaborations.”

Small Things Like These, which he also produced, is indeed a small thing compared with Oppenheimer, but Murphy gives arguably his best performance ever as Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and decent family man who finds himself at loggerheads with the Catholic Church, source of all authority in the country town where he lives. It is set in 1985, years before the Celtic Tiger roared; people live somewhere between poverty and modest means, good Catholics all, much as they have for generations. It is a shock when music starts up in the pub and turns out to be the Human League’s Don’t You Want Me, an ’80s hit. Otherwise, it might as well be 1955.

Bill Furlong delivers coal to the nearby Magdalen laundry, run by the same nuns as the local convent where his five daughters are at school. Everyone knows each other’s business round these parts, but you are advised to mind your own. When he finds a young girl locked in the laundry’s coal cellar on a freezing winter’s night, a well-meaning friend tells him to look to his own family: his girls need that convent education. But Bill can’t just walk away.

It was Yvonne McGuinness, Cillian Murphy’s artist wife, who suggested he and Mielants bring Keegan’s slender but potent story to the screen. They both jumped at it, but it didn’t feel like an easy sell.

“We kind of realised very quickly that it would have to be a very quiet film with an almost non-verbal performance from the main character for it to work, because the book is so interior,” says Murphy. “So we knew it would have to be an unusual kind of film for today’s cinematic landscape.”

Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, the role that earned him an Oscar.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

They had a lucky break, however. Talking to Matt Damon between scenes on the set of Oppenheimer, Murphy told him the story. “He really got it,” Murphy told Deadline later. Artists Equity, Damon’s production company with Ben Affleck, was soon on board.

Murphy can remember something of the Ireland portrayed in Keegan’s novel. “I would have been nine in 1985 and I grew up in a city,” he says. “Luckily, I didn’t directly experience any encounters with these institutions. But everything around me was run by the Church. I went to a Catholic primary school; at my secondary school I was taught by brothers. My dad trained to become a priest but then didn’t become one. It was in every facet of my life, although never in a malevolent way.

Cillian Murphy plays a man who defies the Catholic Church in Small Things Like These.Credit: Shane O’Connor/Lionsgate

“But I was aware there were two laundries in Cork, one very close to where I grew up. It was never talked about. It was only until the whole thing began to be revealed that I began to take notice of it. And then it was kind of this huge schism in Irish society when everything was blown open about the abuses in the Church, and it was kind of devastating for the whole country. It was very hard not to be deeply affected by it, if only as an observer.”

The story takes place just before Christmas, with its attendant festive drinks, puddings being baked at home and a rush for last-minute presents. Set against this is Bill’s melancholy, fading into memories of his own childhood. He was born out of wedlock; his mother was taken as a housekeeper by a wealthy Protestant woman who treated Bill like a grandson, giving him books to read and opening up his world. He has never been told who his father is.

When he finds the shivering girl in the coal cellar – called Sarah, like his mother – he doesn’t need to make a decision about what to do. His body drives him, moving of its own accord.

A Catholic convent is the setting for unspeakable cruelty in Small Things Like These. Credit: Enda Bowe/Lionsgate

“I actually feel he’s in the middle of some sort of nervous breakdown,” says Murphy. “As happens with a lot of middle-aged men who are holding it together, holding it together, having to do that, not dealing with anything emotional – particularly at that point in Ireland – and then it comes like a tsunami and hits him. And he begins to piece together over the course of this Christmas what has formed him as a man … I never, ever considered him a hero and it would have been kind of limiting to play him like that. It was much more interesting to play him as a character who was just kind of driven by this terrible inner reckoning, you know.”

Cases of abuse continue to be brought before the courts and national commissions in Ireland; it is essential work that the majority of people will never see or read; books and films ask questions in a gentler way. Of course, Murphy says, the most egregious abusers – generally priests – should be tracked down and arrested.

“But otherwise, it’s hard to apportion blame,” he says. “Because it was a whole society that seems to have been complicit in what was going on. I think it has to be about understanding, now, how it happened. How did we get to a place where everybody knew, but didn’t know?”

Surely, I say, the convent’s ruling Sister Mary – portrayed by Emily Watson in a rivetingly fiendish performance that won her the top acting award at the recent Berlin Film Festival – deserves punishment? She seems to have thrived on cruelty.

“But then, how could you not blame Eileen?” counters Murphy. “Because she knows what’s going on, that’s very clear, but she doesn’t call it out. I think it is about a spectrum from innocence to complicity. Where does one place oneself on that spectrum? It’s very hard, even now, to talk about it.”

Murphy has a reputation as publicity-shy, but he says he enjoys discussing the work once it is done. Indeed, I get the sense he has several pints’ worth of views on the issues raised by Small Things Like These. When he’s working, however, he acts on instinct; while other actors talk about a process, he says he has no idea what’s going on.

“It’s like doing anything intensively for 17 hours a day and then reading about it and thinking about it all the time,” he says. “Inevitably, you begin to exchange atoms with the character at some point. But it’s never conscious.”

Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders.

I wonder what it must be like to exchange atoms with Tommy Shelby, the red right hand of Peaky Blinders. Murphy has played the ruthless gangster for six seasons, filmed over 12 years. A feature – “one for the fans,” he says – starring Barry Keoghan, Tim Roth and Rebecca Ferguson alongside Murphy, is expected to release in cinemas as well as on Netflix later this year. Murphy laughs.

“He’s exhausting to play,” he says. “The nice thing about Peaky is that we would do a season, and then I’d have a year or 18 months or two years off. And it’s a gift of a character. He’s relentless.”

And another victim of a rotten social system? “Oh well … certainly, I think he’s a product of what happened to British soldiers in the First World War,” he says slowly. “He’s clearly deeply damaged. We always looked at the character like there was a line before 1914 and another line after 1918. We never get to see that earlier version of him, but I think he was forever changed by a different sort of system, where young men were sacrificed and those who survived were just spat back into society.”

Nobody has a monopoly on wrongdoing. When he won his Oscar, Murphy described himself as a proud Irishman. Ireland is home; Ireland is also the wellspring of his values, whatever sins have been committed in its shadows. As he has pointed out; it is only recently that Canada was rocked by revelations of thousands of deaths among indigenous children in so-called residential care. Ireland was not unique; Tim Mielants, the director, had followed similar stories in Belgium. We are all somewhere on that spectrum of complicity.

“I do think, you know, Ireland is a small country and it’s quite a compassionate country,” Murphy says. “You can see that in how the country identifies in world politics. I think also that the amount of music and storytelling and literature that I was swimming in while I was growing up, because I was interested in all that stuff, is part of our DNA. And that is a very positive thing. That formed me. It’s very normal and OK in Ireland to break into song in the pub, to tell a story or recite a poem. And that’s a lovely thing to grow up around.”

Can art make us better people, then? Murphy laughs again. “I’m not going to try to answer that one,” he says. I sense that really is a discussion for the pub.

Small Things Like These is in cinemas from April 10.

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