I meet Cillian Murphy in Cafe Paradiso, his favourite restaurant in his hometown, Cork. It is a low-key establishment and, according to my host, 'the best vegetarian place in the land'. The staff treat their film-star customer like one of the family. 'Eat your greens, Cillian!' a waitress scolds him she passes our table and spots his untouched side salad.
'I like it here,' he says, grinning, and picking at the salad, 'There's a no-bullshit attitude that Cork people have and I feel a whole lot more comfortable with that than the whole fame thing.'
Thus far, Murphy has managed the 'fame thing' remarkably well considering his oft-stated aversion to it. Since entering the movie mainstream last year with his role as Dr Jonathan Crane, aka 'the Scarecrow', in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, he has managed to maintain a relatively low public profile while simultaneously becoming a hot property both here and in Hollywood. He's a guarded interviewee, happy to talk about his work, tight-lipped about his personal life, ill-at-ease with the trade-offs that fame demands.
Last year, following his Batman success, and his chilling portrayal of terrorist Jackson Rippner in Wes Craven's Red Eye, Entertainment Weekly, the American box-office bible, ranked him number three on its list of 'the most valuable players of summer 2005', comparing him with the late Robert Mitchum. High praise indeed, and it came hot on the heels of his Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of the daydreamy transvestite, Patrick 'Kitten' Brady, in Neil Jordan's meandering but intriguing Breakfast on Pluto
'That was the most challenging character I've played to date,' he says, sipping a glass of red wine and tucking into a tortilla, 'but there was something even scarier about playing someone who's from my own territory. Plus, I'm pure, undiluted Cork. I go back and back. My granny's people were from around Ballingeary. In many ways, I had to get it right.'
He is referring to his latest lead role as Damien, a medical student who becomes an IRA volunteer, in Ken Loach's epic and controversial drama about the Irish war of independence, The Wind that Shakes the Barley. The film won the Palme D'or at Cannes last month, but has already raised hackles in the right-wing press here and in Ireland for its supposedly anti-British bias. What has been overlooked thus far are the drama's deeper, and contemporary, resonances: how ordinary citizens can be radicalised by a state-sponsored war of terror waged indiscriminately against them; what killing for a cause does to an individual's soul.
The Wind that Shakes the Barley follows the fortunes of an IRA flying column as it wages a ruthless guerrilla war on the feared and hated 'Black and Tans', a notorious British army regiment whose excesses are still etched in the collective memory around these parts. The film was shot in the rolling west Cork countryside, where the actual flying columns operated and, though the subject matter is loaded and provocative, the filming, according to Murphy, was anything but fraught.
'It was a beautiful shoot, absolutely beautiful,' he enthuses, beaming at the memory. 'Easily my best experience in terms of the process of acting. Plus, it was during the summer months; I was living at home with my folks; my wife was pregnant with our son; and we were running around the hills of west Cork shooting up Black and Tans. Fantastic!'
Murphy makes clear that he desperately wanted the role and auditioned for Loach 'half-a-dozen times'. According to the film's producer, Rebecca O'Brien, Murphy would not have been cast at all had he not been from Cork. 'I doubt Ken had even heard of him,' she told an American reporter who visited the set. Last week I asked Loach how he now rated Cillian Murphy as an actor. 'The first thing I'd say is that he is very instinctive, absolutely in tune with his feelings. I could not have predicted the way he chose to play two or three of the scenes, but, each time, his approach was dead right. That's quite rare.'
Though characteristically reluctant to single out Murphy's performance in what is very much an ensemble film, Loach finally came close to the heart of the young actor's particular strength.
'I think all the great actors allow themselves to be vulnerable. To make something that matters, you cannot withhold anything. You have to be vulnerable in a way to be strong. Otherwise, you don't risk anything. Let's just say Cillian made the part his own. It is him now.'
I ask Murphy if, initially, he had any reservations about taking the part, given that it was a film almost guaranteed to cause controversy?
'No, none at all. For me, it was, like, bring on the controversy,' he grins. 'I mean, it's Ken Loach. People know his politics by now and what sort of slant it would have. But he's an extraordinarily rigorous director who tackles difficult subjects and a truly great artist. Any actor worth his salt would have given his eye teeth for the role.'
Though reluctant to be drawn on the politics of the film, Murphy is quick to reject the accusations that the film is anti-British.
'I need to be very careful talking about this,' he says, after a long pause. 'It's all right talking to someone who's familiar with the complexities of the Irish situation, but you could see how the film could be hijacked. I'm sure Sinn Fein will love it, for instance, but to say that it is somehow anti-British is just plain wrong. There was an occupying force and all the atrocities they committed were well-documented by Labour party commissions and that. It's a complex situation, but I think Ken and Paul [Laverty, the scriptwriter] addressed the historical complexities.'
In the film, Murphy's character, Damien, is radicalised by his first-hand experience of the brutalities of the occupying British soldiers and forgoes a place at medical college in London to join the local flying column. The film traces his journey from pacifist and potential life- saver to committed socialist and reluctant killer. Its most affecting moments occur when Damien has to turn his gun on his own, first when he has to execute a friend who is uncovered as an informer, and later when the flying column splits down the middle in the civil war that followed the acceptance by Ireland's rebel leaders of a treaty weighted very much in Britain's favour.
'The way Ken works, you never quite know what is going to happen either to your character or to the story,' says Murphy. 'It's a style of film-making where you never know the whole story and that keeps you on your toes all the time. But, I tell you, that day up on the mountain where I had to execute that young fella, that was a terrible day. I didn't find out he was a traitor until I was told on screen and I had to act accordingly. It sort of brings it home to you.'
Murphy tells me that his family 'had someone shot by the Black and Tans at Passage West. A young fella, aged 16 or 17, who died from bleeding'. He pauses again. 'It was talked about now and again, but we were not a politicised family. There's not many families around who weren't touched by the war of independence or the civil war, but it's still hard to get people to talk about it. I had to do my research. I read the books, knew how principled these men were and how ruthless they had to be. Even acting it, you get some idea of what life was like, how ordinary men were changed utterly by the things they had to do in a war.'
Murphy is seldom off screen throughout the film's two-and-a-half hours and seems, in the course of the narrative, to become a different calibre of actor than any of his previous roles - even that of 'Kitten' Brady - suggested.
His fellow actor, Liam Cunningham, who plays Dan, an older Marxist, describes Murphy's performance as 'being as close to himself as anything he has ever done. There's a quiet intensity in the Damien character that is there, too, in Cillian. And an honesty and a generosity in his approach. He doesn't do what I call "trailer acting" - stuff that will look good on a trailer but doesn't in the end add up to much. He's growing into more of an Ed Harris type of presence, the kind of actor who makes you want to go and see any movie his name is attached to'.
Murphy, who has just turned 30, came to acting late and by an oddly circuitous route. Having attended University College, Cork, where he studied law, he formed a rock band with his younger brother, who shared his obsession with the Beatles. The band was called Sons of Mr Greengenes after a song by one of his other teenage heroes, Frank Zappa. By all reports, they were pretty wild.
'We were actually offered a five-album deal by the Acid Jazz label in London,' Murphy says, shaking his head as if he still cannot quite believe it. 'I sang and played guitar. We specialised in wacky lyrics and endless guitar solos. It was touch and go there for a while between rock music and movies, but I think I made the right choice.'
What swayed him in the end? 'Well, my parents, if truth be told. My brother was still at school and I had just started college. My parents were terrified they were going to lose the both of us into the jaws of the rock'n'roll monster. So, we bailed. And I'm glad we bailed because I know a few guys who were in bands that didn't make it and it seems to do something to your soul.'
According to Cunningham, Murphy 'is still a great singer and a dab hand at the guitar a well as having the look', but, thankfully, he has no plans to go down the doomed actor-in-a-rock-band route taken by the likes of Keanu Reeves and Juliette Lewis. 'I don't think so,' he says with a wince when I mention the option. 'No, I really don't think so. Even if I was good, the very notion of being an actor with a rock band on the side would mean I'd never be taken seriously.'
Murphy landed his first acting role when he was still intent on being a rock star. In 1996, fresh out of law school, he auditioned on a whim for the lead in the original stage version of Disco Pigs by young Irish playwright Enda Walsh, which later had an acclaimed run at the Bush Theatre in London. He then reprised the role in Kirsten Sheridan's less successful film version, for which he also wrote a song for the soundtrack. How did it feel taking the stage without a guitar in his hand?
'Fucking electrifying!' he says, his startlingly bright blue eyes lighting up even more. 'It was at an arts centre just down the road, then it transferred to a bar in Dublin, where the stage was about the size of a billiard table. What a buzz, though. Nothing like it.' He falls silent suddenly. 'I just did it for the buzz back then. I never really got nervous until much later when I realised I had to keep doing this to pay the mortgage.' He sounds oddly regretful. 'Nah, I'm fucking blessed man,' he laughs, 'but I do miss the buzz of live performance. I did Playboy [of the Western World] about two years ago. The charge of electricity between you and an audience is the best.'
Murphy caught the attention of Hollywood when he starred in 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle, which became a sleeper hit in America in 2002, and featured the young Irishman in his first full-frontal nude role. When I mention his ever-growing and obsessively devoted young female fan base, he seems genuinely embarrassed. 'It's not that intrusive,' he smiles, 'and besides, when they recognise me, they never seem to remember my name.'
Murphy married his long-term girlfriend, Yvonne McGuinness, in Provence in the summer of 2004 just before he began filming Breakfast in Pluto. They have a young son, Malachy, and live in west London. 'I'd ideally like to do a film a year and just spend the rest of my time with the family, playing my guitar, and going to gigs,' he says wistfully after a few glasses of wine. 'There's a quality of life thing about all this, too. I don't believe in the need to be a tortured artist in order to do great work. I just want to challenge myself with each role and not repeat myself. I really don't think you have to be rolling around in pain to do that. I want to enjoy my family, too, and have a regular, rewarding life. You often feel that gets lost in the equation somewhere along the line.'
On cue, his wife and son turn up and the interview winds down into an informal chat. I ask him finally, if he is ambitious? He seems less so than any actor I have ever met.
'Oh, I'm ambitious, all right,' he says without hesitation, 'but I don't have a big strategy. Put it this way - I know what I don't want to do much clearer than I know what I do want to do.'
Thus far, that easygoing but clear-headed approach has paid off handsomely. His next starring role is in Danny Boyle's much anticipated science-fiction film, Sunshine, where he plays a physicist on a mission to firebomb the sun. 'We're on a mission to reignite the sun, then shit goes wrong,' he laughs, 'as it always does in spaceship movies. It's all blue screen and special effects, a whole world away from Ken Loach.'
He thinks about this for a moment, pouring the last of the wine. 'In a way, this acting game is really all about having your head screwed on. You read a script and you decide. Nobody else ever decides for me. I'm free to say no. I don't want to make a movie I don't believe in, and, so far, I haven't. It's the same with the whole fame thing. You manage it and you negotiate it. The important thing, Sean, is to keep your head screwed on.'
With that, he's up and off, back to the quiet, everyday life he obviously treasures above all else. He appears to be that rare thing: an actor blessed by good sense.
· The Wind that Shakes the Barley opens in the UK on 23 June
From Cork to Pluto
· 5 May 1976, born in Cork to a school inspector father and school teacher mother.
· Studied law at University College Cork but dropped out to tour in the stage production of Disco Pigs
· Lives in west London with video installation artist wife Yvonne McGuinness and their son Malachy.
· Nominated for best villain at MTV awards for his Scarecrow in Batman Begins (2005).
· Was comfortable doing full-frontal nudity in 28 days later ... (2002).
· Went to an abattoir and chopped up some pigs to prepare for his role as Pieter in Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003).
· Nominated for a best actor Golden Globe for his performance as a transvestite in Breakfast on Pluto (2005).
· Stars in Sunshine (due 2007).