Cillian Murphy Quotes

I don't know if anyone will ever sit beside me on a plane again.

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 went down and spent time with transvestites in London in the clubs and all that. Got an insight to that world, and it's a mad world, but they are very warm and very open people. It was a great experience.

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

I will always love film, the romance of film, sitting in the darkened room with strangers and watching a story for two hours - that will always remain and never be eroded by television.

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.

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

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 hope that I have gained some wisdom, but I don't know. I have kids, and that certainly puts things into perspective. I think I'm a more patient person. I hope I'm a more patient person. I'm a little more relaxed about the peripheral side of this business, which I used to find very confusing and alarming.

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.

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.

We were able to shoot in a lot of the locations where the mission actually happened and these guys existed, so that was kind of very affecting. We had a Czech crew and a lot of Czech actors. There's a great deal of authenticity to the project [Anthropoid], and Sean [Ellis] was very anxious that that was the case from the beginning.

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

I'm Irish and very proud of being Irish, but as an actor, your extraction should be secondary, really. You should be able to embody whatever character it is, wherever the character comes from. That's always been important, for me. I'm an actor who's Irish, not an Irish actor.

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

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.

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

The boring people are the worst. I think it's obvious, I think people have always had phobias about flying for years even before 9/11 and everything like that. It just taps into that and it taps into who you are going to sit next to on the plane.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 don't think they'd ever make a movie about Chuck Baker but I'd love to play Chuck Baker

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.

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 feel very lucky to be making good work still. The confidence of youth, or that sort of competitiveness you get when you're 22 or 23, the impatience - that's probably been tempered. Hopefully I'm slightly better company.

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.

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 think audiences are a lot more intelligent than what we give them credit for and understand that an actor is playing a role and that doesn't mean he can't play different types of roles.

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."

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