65 Quotes by Cillian Murphy

My only two constants are to challenge myself and to try not to repeat myself.

I suppose I tend to like slightly darker things - people have levelled that on me before and I accept that because in my opinion, if I mention the best movies or the best books, there's always something that's involving slightly darker element of out psyche. I like seeing people under pressure. I like seeing what happens to people when they're under pressure.

I like being at home with my music and my books. I’ve done all the partying, I’ve done enough partying for four or five people as a young fella. But now I like the quiet life.

Sociopath is a word that has sort of become shorthand for psychopath and there's a distinct difference, it's interesting if you look it up. Sociopath if you look at the medical definition, the profile of a sociopath is that they are supremely intelligent people that are also pathological liars, they have no moral structure and there is one more, they have no compassion or empathy for other people.

I personally think if something's not a challenge there's no point doing it because you're not gonna learn much.

I take my hat off to the ladies. The amount of grooming-plucking and shaving and all the other things men never have to do.

I'm terrible. I'm the wrong person to talk to, I really don't know a thing.

I was obsessed with Batman as a kid. I did the film in part just to be near the Batmobile. But I also think [director] Christopher Nolan made a very fine, intelligent film.

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If you behave like a celebrity, then people will treat you like a celebrity, and if you don't, they won't. There's not much to write about me in the tabloids.

You know, I'm a skinny Irish guy.

I try not to think retrospectively. It's important, as an artist, to look forward, always. I do try to take work that involves some challenge. If you approach a piece of work and you're going, "Yeah, yeah, I can do that," then that's kind of a red flag.

I don't have a burning passion to live in America per se but I would certainly like to work there.

And once you're unafraid with death, I think your capacity for violence is immediately increased. Once you're unafraid of death, you are a very, very dangerous adversary

It seemed to work on camera. And there's very few films - because you make a lot of films and you meet people and you work very intensely and intimately and then you're gone - but there's a few where you actually make friends, and this [The Fall] was one.

I'm not interested in a good man's life. I'm interested in contradiction.

For me it's always been about the stories, not what medium. The medium is secondary to the stories.

I suppose I've always been attracted to this sort of outsider in general - in literature, in music, politics, whatever - and to the person that is able to be relentlessly themselves. I don't think that I have that quality, that strength of mind.

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I don't consider myself a shy person necessarily, but there's something about getting under the skin of a character and allowing you an abandon or a sense of courage that you would never have in your own life.

You need to be as clean of a slate as you can be, as an actor. You have to try to be open to every experience.

I’ve never done a film for the money

You're an actor who's Irish, not an Irish actor. And you shouldn't be limited by your extraction.

I think there's such a thing as a performance gene. If it's in your DNA it needs to come out. For me, it originally came out through music, then segued into acting and came out through there. I always needed to get up and perform.

I think you fall out of love with theater while you're doing your eighth show of your eighteenth week and your body is saying, "Please make this end."

I think it's necessary to keep moving forward. I've always said that nostalgia is death, really for anyone creative.

It's always nice to be challenged.

The best roles you have to fight for. You have to really want to do it and you have to go after it.

I'd probably have been wealthier if I had stayed with law, but pretty miserable doing it.

I think for me with theater, I need to take a break and then fall in love with it again. And then go do it again.

I think any actor that says 'I never watch my films' is a liar because you have to watch it at least once and also you're going to watch it when you're doing your ADR.

There's a lot of comedy in Intermission but it's got this depth. It's not comedy for comedy's sake - it's informed by something else. I like stuff like that

I'm interested in pressure, I'm interested in duress. All the great works of art, or film or literature, in my opinion, have elements of those in them.

Every Irish person of my generation and earlier, we were raised Catholic and we'd have to learn it in school, we'd to learn the catechism by rote.

For me, drama is conflict.

I think if you play characters, it's very important not to ever tag them with any sort of disorder, or diagnose them, or whatever. You have to normalize the behavior to get inside the character.

I've always felt kind of safe on stage, protected. I've talked to other performers about this and they feel the same things, particularly in the live arena. I never get nervous going on stage to do a play. Doing film or television I'll have more butterflies.

I'm pretty adamant to do an American accent because you get it immediately.

My wife can see always how a part affects me personally because she has to live with it.

I never make a distinction between doing a film in Hollywood or doing a film independently. It's just the story. It's always the story for me. The constants are that it should challenge me and I shouldn't repeat myself. And the story should always be a story worth telling.

Actors' careers are random with a capital "R."

At the moment I'm doing this space movie, so I'm obsessed with physics and space travel. I know three months down the line it's gone. Then I'll be able to superficially say stuff about space.

I really feel actors should try and do as much diverse work as possible to try and keep it interesting.

I'm kind of loath to pick one project over another or whatever. You go into every film sort of thinking it'll be your best work, and that's necessary. I think in this business, you really have to be forward-looking the whole time. I think nostalgia is sort of the death knell for any artist.

I'd love to work in America, some of my favourite films come from America.

Two weeks ago we couldn't pronounce your name, but you were in the lead in a film that made millions, so we're sending you all these scripts.

That's what acting is about, Funny wigs and voices, that's what we do.

You take the job very seriously and between action and cut, that's where your focus should be. And then there's a lot of levity in between and a lot of good fun.

With some films you can sort of slide in, get a haircut and you're in.

Then, at age 20, I discovered theater sort of by accident. Quite quickly, theater became more important to me than music. I began to realize that maybe my talents as a musician were quite limited, or had a ceiling to them, whereas acting seemed to sort of stretch before me. I got very passionate about it very quickly.

It's a very organic kind of way that people are discovering it, by word of mouth, which I always think is the best way for things to grow. In terms of the affect it's been having on me, I don't even notice that. It's lovely to be able to talk about a piece of work that you're very proud of, that I think's a complex piece of work and not superficial and has depth to it.

There's this thing that's come about that wasn't there when I started acting which is they do this thing called a chemistry test. They put a camera in front of two people, it's usually a boy and a girl, and they go, [whispering]. It's impossible. You can't manufacture it or film it, it just has to happen.

All I've tried to do as an actor is follow the good writing. That's been my main drive. It's not always possible, so when you do come upon it, like when I came upon this, you realize pretty quickly this is something you need to be involved with.

The medium is secondary to the stories.

I have a list as long as my arm but I find those lists sort of self-defeating because you start to name and then after [the interviewer] leaves the room you go 'Ah, I forgot this person or that person.' So I just don't do it anymore. Hopefully if you make work that people like, they'll get in contact with you.

I guess because theater's so ephemeral and it's gone. You make this nightly contract with the audience and you redraw that contract for the next night, whereas film and television, it's forever. I suppose it's always about adopting personas, never about being yourself. I think they call it a "shy man's revenge."

There's always a level where you think you can improve and do better. Certainly at the beginning... I did four years of straight theater without ever having a part in a movie, and I remember being far more nervous on a film set than I was on the stage. It took a while for that to become less so.

I think every director has a different methodology.

I like the little bit of distance that London affords me and I like living in a world capital. I like having the culture at my fingertips.

And, for any performer, to be able to go deep into character is fantastic. In film you only get to do that if you're the leading character. But in television you get 18 hours to really test the audience and take them to the edge of how far they will go with this character. I can step over this line and I love that.

It's obvious that if you're going to play a character you need to amass information about that person and about their environment or their era that they're in and use as little or as much as necessary

I always think it's a sign of a truly gifted director when they can move seamlessly between genres.

I've had the pleasure and the great luck to work with some incredible actors over the years and you have to observe and learn and take something from it and try and become better yourself.

[We were very lucky that Sean [ Ellis ] researched the film [Anthropoid ] for many years.] We sort of piggybacked on his knowledge, and he gave us a lot of materials, which we read. For me, the greatest resource was actually shooting the film in Prague.

I like watching film, I go to the cinema, but a lot of times I go to see kids' films.

I don't care if people perceive me as always selling out because I'm doing a studio picture. For me, the whole thing is you should be diverse in your choices; that's the beauty of being an actor, you should be able to do that.