Irish film and theatre actor Cillian Murphy is regarded as a solicitous actor—who’s attentive and respectful towards his job.
Be it Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s biopic or the enigmatic Thomas Shelby in the hit TV series Peaky Blinders, Murphy’s portrayals say it all.
He chooses to remain opaque and not to have a social media presence in an era where stars prefer spilling their life stories online.
But in an interview, he appeared a bit more talkative about his approach to acting. The Irish native even playfully mocked himself, labeling his response as “pretentious.”
Cillian Murphy Playfully Mocks His Own Loquacious Side in an Interview
Cillian Murphy stopped by L.A. Times to answer Very Important Questions about himself. One of the questions asks, “What is the most interesting fact you learned while working preparing for Oppenheimer?” To this, Murphy answers:
“What I like to do is prep and prep and prep and prep and then kind of park them for the shoot, because I think acting isn’t an intellectual exercise. It’s an instinctual one. So facts are useless to you in a scene with another character, another actor. So, I have them all in my head. And then I kind of just, they just float around there and I call them if I need to. But mostly it’s just about the heart instead of the mind. You know when you’re working. What a pretentious answer.”
Here, Cillian Murphy is expressing his approach to acting. He believes that preparation is all that actors should emphasize to internalize the details of the characters within them.
So, during the actual performance, the 47-year-old relies more on emotions and views acting as a fully heart-driven process rather than a mental one. After expressing his takes on acting, Murphy kinda felt that he overly elaborated his answer and sounded “pretentious.” But is it so?
Is Cillian Murphy a Pretentious Actor?
Murphy is intelligent, thoughtful, and sincere about his artistic motivations. Obviously, he’s a pleasant interviewee, but he likes to keep the talks focused solely on his work.
“I didn’t see myself as a personality,” he has previously said on The Irish Times. “I see myself as an actor. I think those are two distinct jobs. And my job is to portray other people.”
So, it can be said that he’s not pretentious. He simply shies away from attention and likes to talk about things that matter.
It doesn’t even mean that the Oppenheimer star was trying to be overly smart in the above statement. Instead, he seems to be expressing a personal philosophy about his approach to acting. That’s it.
