For almost a quarter of his life, Cillian Murphy has played Tommy Shelby, one of the most iconic TV characters of the 21st Century. On the eve of the new Peaky Blinders film, the Oscar-winning actor talks to Donal O’Donoghue about the appeal of Shelby, his love of music and why he took a year-long break from acting.
“I’ve played the character for a quarter of my life now, so I think I have a good understanding of how Tommy Shelby ticks,” says Cillian Murphy of the role that has, even with his Oscar for Oppenheimer, defined his acting career thus far.
It’s impossible to imagine the TV drama, Peaky Blinders, without Murphy. From that first knock-out appearance of his gypsy gangster – a bespoke-suited man on a horse clip-clopping along the sooty streets of post-WWI Birmingham – to the new Netflix film where the Peaky boss takes on the Nazis, this is one of the iconic screen characters of recent times.
“You grow into the character of Thomas Shelby as you grow into middle age,” says the 49-year-old Murphy, dad to two adult boys. “And you also begin to examine and explore all the different themes and topics that happen to men in middle age.”
Murphy is in a hotel in Birmingham, home to Peaky Blinders and the man who created it, Steven Knight.
The Cork actor has never been a big fan of interviews. One time in London, he arrived for the last five minutes of a two-hander (co-star Tom Hollander had been holding the fort), sheepishly saying he had got lost in the corridors. But he is a thoughtful talker: eloquently articulate on his passions (acting, music), elegantly skirting the personal.
“I’m alright,” he says in that laconic drawl, chuckling when I belatedly congratulate him on his Best Actor Oscar for Oppenheimer in 2024. “That’s old news.”
Indeed. On the day we speak, his most recent film, Steve, which Murphy also produced, was BAFTA-nominated for Outstanding British Film (“We’re delighted”), and after a year’s break from acting, he’s now busily preparing to return to the fray.
But before that comes the big screen debut of flat cap crusader Tommy Shelby (there has been a dance theatre show, The Redemption of Thomas Shelby) after six seasons of TV. “It was really the question of, ‘How do we find an elegant way of closing this chapter of the story?’,” says Murphy of the film.
“We had been talking for many years about making a film, and then a few things happened. We were supposed to shoot series six and seven back-to-back, but Covid came along, and we just did series six. That was a very open-ended finale, so Steve, Tom Harper (director), and I spent quite a few years talking about how we would do the film.
“It was a challenge. Normally, we tell the story in six hours, and this had to be done in two. We also wanted to make it a stand-alone film so that people who haven’t spent 36 hours watching the other six seasons can watch. So, it was a bit of a trick to pull off.”
Netflix/Robert Viglasky ©
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man taps into the supernatural, with Shelby haunted by the ghosts of his past and premonitions of what’s to come. Does Cillian Murphy believe in a realm beyond the physical one? “I believe in energy and the transfer of energy, and as an artist, that’s what you are doing all the time,” he says. “I completely believe in that energy just as I believe in the negative energy of trauma, violence and conflict. But in terms of ghosts and spectres and all of that, I’ve yet to be convinced.”
He says that the first time he felt that energy was with music (before acting, there was music and almost a band, Sons of Mr Green Genes). “Then I chased it down on stage, experienced it with Disco Pigs and other shows. But it doesn’t always happen, and there are nights that are flat and not good. But that’s why people keep going back; to chase that moment of transcendence.”
In 2004, I met Murphy in Galway on the eve of his portrayal of Christy Mahon in Druid’s staging of The Playboy of the Western World. He was 27 and on the crest of something big, having just been cast as The Scarecrow in Batman Begins and tipped by Hollywood as the next big thing. But what was striking about the young actor was that, despite the buzz, he was only interested in “doing work I believe in.”
That’s how it was and has been ever since. So, what did he want from acting back then, and what does he want from acting now? He smiles. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m a bit like Tommy Shelby in that way. You have this need to create, to express yourself. I have a need to perform even though I’m a shy person. But that need is just there and has been in there since I was a small boy. It can be a burden, or it can be a gift, depending on how you look at it.”
Murphy grew up in the Cork suburb of Ballintemple. His parents, Mary and Brendan, were both teachers, but he was always drawn to the arts. “I remember watching Shane as a kid with my dad,” he says of those faraway days. “I used to love those westerns. And what was exciting about Peaky when I first read it was that while it leaned into those tropes, it also transposed them to Britain. And not London but the second city, Birmingham, and the characters were working-class, like the cowboys in westerns or the emigrants in The Godfather.
“(Steven) once told me that writing Peaky was like spring water to him. He doesn’t sit down and plot out the structure; it just flowed. I imagine that’s because his mother passed down the stories from her parents, and so it’s endlessly there. I’m still in awe of his joy for his work. But we should all have that joy for what we do.”
Ever since he wrapped The Immortal Man at the end of 2024, Murphy has been on a sabbatical from acting. “I’d love to extend it for another year,” he says and laughs. “I love not working.” He’s joking, sort of. Apart from playing and writing music, he has been busy producing films with his production company, Big Things Films, in post-production on the film and working on Sounds from a Safe Harbour (Murphy co-curated the 10th anniversary of the Cork cultural happening).
“I’ve been busy but just not acting,” he says. “I needed a rest from it, that’s all. I’m ready to go back to acting now, I was joking earlier: it’s just that I don’t quite have the stamina that I had as a younger man. It’s important to rest, recharge the batteries and get back that love for it again.”
Like the TV series, the Peaky Blinders film is fuelled by a blistering contemporary soundtrack, including Fontaines DC and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. “The Fontaines wrote all this new music specially for the film, composing the music to picture,” says Murphy. “And Nick Cave rerecorded Red Right Hand for the film, so what you hear on screen is a brand-new version of the song. Music has always been integral to the show, part of the soul of Peaky.”
Music has always been part of the soul of Murphy, too. “When you’re making new music, you’re creating your own thing,” he says, adding that he has been playing and writing music this past year. “An actor’s role is really to interpret the work of other people, which is a great gift to be given, but when you’re writing music, it’s hitting the air for the first time, and that’s special.”
In 2024, Murphy and his wife, the artist Yvonne McGuinnesss, bought the shuttered Phoenix cinema in Dingle, the picture-house of his childhood holidays. The plan was to refurbish the building and reopen it as a multidisciplinary community arts centre.
“We have been talking with the community on the Dingle peninsula as to what they might want, not just a cinema but an arts hub with a devoted stage because there is none on the peninsula,” he says. “It’s an iconic building, and the people are really invested in it, so we really want to get it right with Irish language cinema as well as a theatre space and a music venue in there too. We have big plans, but it will take time.”
Will it open later this year? “You never say never, but it’s about going through all those hoops you must go through with making a building for the public. But we’re committed to getting it done.”
Earlier in 2024, he co-founded the production company, Big Things Films, with Alan Moloney, and its credits so far include Small Things Like These and Steve. One of the company’s ambitions is “to take audiences to places that can often reveal core truths about who we are”.
So, what films have inspired Cillian Murphy down the years? “So many. I remember vividly seeing The Butcher Boy, Neil Jordan’s film, for the first time, having already read the book by Patrick McCabe. That Irish Gothic horror that McCabe conjured up in his book was so funny but so awful. And the film was like taking a snow globe of rural Ireland and shaking the hell out of it. I was in awe of that film. Taxi Driver also had a huge impact on me growing up, as it probably did for most adolescents. And I was always going to the cinema, never the theatre, not least because it was just £2 to get in.”
In Mach, 2024, Murphy made history by becoming the first Irish-born actor to win a Best Actor Oscar. Did Oppenheimer change things for him? “You asked about the films that I watched as a kid, and I believe that shapes your taste,” he says. “I believe that the stuff you watch between the ages of 15 and 20 or the books or music you consume at that age, that’s where your taste is formed. And my taste hasn’t really changed, even if it has evolved through the people I have worked with.
“The first film I made after Oppenheimer was Small Things Like These, and then the next one was Steve, so I just kept on doing films that I wanted to make. I suppose if the Oscar helped those films get picked up or distributed, like Netflix did with Steve, then I’ll take that. But in terms of my own taste and the work I want to make, that hasn’t changed in any way.”
The first time I ever met Cillian Murphy was in 1999 when he had been cast as Johnny Boyle in Druid’s production of Juno and the Paycock in Dublin. The late, great Michael Gambon, star of the show as ‘Captain’ Boyle, was the man lined up to interview about his storied career. But there was a secondary request to chat with the up-and-coming actor from Cork who had been a knock-out in his professional debut with Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs.
Cillian was a delight, sweet and quiet (he asked if I could give a shout-out to his gran), but a man who knew where he was going three years after that debut in the Corcadorca show. “I need to take breaks from acting because a lot of it becomes acting adjacent, like turning up at things and all that,” he says now of the road he has travelled since. “It is so important to keep the joy and passion that drove you into acting in the first place.”
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in cinemas from March 6 and on Netflix from March 20.