by David Michael Brown
When John Krasinski needed to cast a new male lead for the second entry in the A Quiet Place franchise, it was no easy task.
With the Abbott family now fatherless, Evelyn (Emily Blunt), her newly born baby, deaf and fearless daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and son Marcus (Noah Jupe) are fighting for survival against a blind alien invasion that hunts using sound. They find begrudging help from a reticent family friend Emmett who had been battling demons as well as the rampaging extra-terrestrials.
Cillian Murphy takes on this complex character and gives a brilliant, layered performance. Morally ambiguous, Emmett is a shadow of Krasinski’s character. He is a different view of fatherhood. One wracked with guilt over what he sees as his own shortcomings. By helping the Abbotts, he finds redemption of sorts.
Murphy regaled on the film’s press tour that he wrote Krasinski an email extolling the virtues of the first film. He never sent it but a year later, this pivotal role in the sequel was his.
Born in Cork, Ireland, it’s fitting that Murphy first made a bloody blot on the cinema-going public’s consciousness in Danny Boyle’s post-apocalyptic biological bloodfest 28 Days Later in 2002. Written by Alex Garland, Murphy plays Jim, a bicycle courier who awakens from a coma to find himself strolling through the deserted streets of London after a highly contagious virus called “Rage” has wiped out most of England, turning previously mild-mannered humans into vicious aggressive undead killers… just don’t mention the “z” word. Brutal, bleak and frenetically violent, the film introduced the world to the concept of sprinting “zombies” and pre-empted The Walking Dead with its bleak and desolate vision of a society at the brink of extinction.
He worked with Boyle and Garland again on the 2007 Sci-fi genre mash-up Sunshine, joining Rose Byrne and Chris Evans as part of a team of international astronauts who have been sent on a dangerous mission to reignite the dying Sun with a nuclear fission bomb in 2057.
The other actor/director relationship that Murphy has nurtured is with Christopher Nolan. In Batman Begins (2005), the Irish actor played Dr. Jonathan Crane and his terrifying alter ego The Scarecrow. The character’s hallucinogenic horrors resonated with audiences and Murphy continued to play the character in The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Murphy actually auditioned for the part of a caped-crusading Bruce Wayne, and even-screen tested opposite Amy Adams, but in Murphy’s estimation, “I never, ever, ever considered myself Bruce Wayne material,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
He also played a major part in Nolan’s best film – the heady multi-layered conceptual masterpiece Inception (2010). Murphy – joining an astonishing cast that boasts Leonardo DiCaprio along with Nolan regulars Michael Caine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard and Tom Hardy – plays Robert Michael Fischer, the heir to a business empire and the victim of some mind-bending industrial espionage. While he sleeps, professional thief Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) and his team are deep-diving into his subconsciousness to implant an idea. It’s a head fuck, quite literally. Continuing the relationship, the actor also took a small role in the director’s riveting WWI drama Dunkirk (2017).
It’s testament to his standing as an actor that Cillian Murphy has worked with directors like Ken Loach in The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2007), Ron Howard in In the Heart of the Sea (2015) and Ben Wheatley in Free Fire (2016). And he is now best known as the cunning Thomas Shelby, the leader of the throat-slashing Peaky Blinders gang, so named because of their penchant for sewing razor blades into the peaks of their caps. Bloody, gritty and superbly played, TV show Peaky Blinders, set in a post-war Britain, is a handsomely mounted period drama that proves once again, that no matter how damaged and twisted the character he plays, Murphy lends them a humanity that makes them fascinating to watch.
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