He explores the more subtle complexities of human behavior with the self-sacrifice that breaks through the possessive rage of Disco Pigs’s Darren and with the discordant desires for the survival of self and species as a rugged recluse in A Quiet Place Part II. It’s overt in the multiple personalities of a quiet bank clerk (one of which is his supposed wife) in Peacock and in the morally perverted psychologist by day, supervillain in a burlap sack by night of the Dark Knight trilogy. This trope is perhaps most obvious with antihero Thomas Shelby in Peaky Blinders, through which Murphy, over the course of six seasons, seamlessly amalgamated a cocky criminal, a war hero, an emotionally estranged outcast, an ill-willed informant, an ideologically malleable member of Parliament, and a floundering father into a single character.Įven within the constrained time frames of film, he’s repeatedly proffered the multipronged nature of man. Each of his roles is a prime embodiment of the widely claimed, rarely achieved Onion Person, the layers of whom he strategically unfurls across any given performance.
Where deficiencies in Murphy’s own character are observably lacking, the appeal of those he inhabits is rooted in the epistemological privilege granted to their audience which teases at their most abject peculiarities. “I don’t sleep around, I don’t go and fall down drunk.” Things, I’d argue, an ordinary person typically counts in their behavioral history. “I haven’t created any controversy,” he once told the Sunday Times. But the actor isn’t ordinary ironically, it’s his lack of ordinary behavior that’s bolstered his reputation as ordinary despite being. For Murphy, it’s a more subconscious, osmotic study of behavior-one that can only be achieved by truly living an ordinary life.
Most of the time, he prefers the role of the observer to that of the observed-and not in the ogling sort of way that his largely (and intentionally) obscure public image is often consumed.
As such, Cillian Murphy is understood as a mutant among men, because, for him, that desire is contained to his on-screen self. Years ago, the actor requested the cinematic rights to the writer’s ‘Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi’-here, they revisit the proposalĪctors, as a species, yearn to be observed.
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