Cillian Murphy AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Blindboy Podcast

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Cillian Murphy ) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (The Blindboy Podcast) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

The Blindboy Podcast episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog

Episode: Cillian Murphy

Author: Blindboyboatclub
Duration: 01:04:53

Episode Shownotes

I chat with Cork actor Cillian Murphy about his new film "Small things like these" Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
Peruse the bootleg dupe, you droopy Q's ex. Welcome to the Blind Byte podcast. If this is your first episode, maybe consider going back to an earlier episode. Some people even begin from the start, which was seven years ago this week.

00:00:17 Speaker_00
I put out my first ever podcast this week, seven years ago. My first ever episode

00:00:25 Speaker_00
I read out a short story that I wrote because I didn't think anyone would be interested in my short stories so I created this podcast with the intention of just drawing attention to some short stories that I'd written.

00:00:40 Speaker_00
I never really intended the podcast to become a regular weekly thing and here we are seven years later and I haven't missed. I've delivered a podcast every single Wednesday since 2018. And I'm gonna continue doing that so long as somebody's listening.

00:00:58 Speaker_00
And as a wonderful piece of just bizarre synchronicity, the short story that I read on that first ever episode, that short story was called, Did You Read About Erskine Fogarty? A story set in 2007 about

00:01:17 Speaker_00
I bought a man, a man, a Limerick man living in Dublin who'd made a lot of money in the Celtic Tiger and then it suddenly disappeared with the economic crash and all he has left is his American fridge freezer so he drags his American fridge freezer all the way back to Limerick

00:01:33 Speaker_00
And that story, that was the first ever episode of this podcast, but this week, I'm adapting that short story into a fucking short movie, a short film, with the actor Robbie Sheehan. That's what I'm doing this week, I'm on set.

00:01:48 Speaker_00
I want to thank everybody who's been listening to this podcast. I want to thank the people who've been supporting the podcast on Patreon. You've completely changed my life. You have completely changed my life.

00:02:02 Speaker_00
When I began this podcast, I thought that my career was over. I'd spent my twenties trying to make it in television and music and it didn't work out. My book of short stories was just, it was like a last shot in the dark. And that and this podcast,

00:02:20 Speaker_00
That's allowed me to earn a living. That has allowed me to earn a living for the past seven years. And that's all I want to be honest. I don't want much more than that. I want to write. I want to be creative. And I want those things to be my job.

00:02:35 Speaker_00
And that's what my podcast is. So thank you so much to every single listener. We're up to fucking 75 million listens now, let's most my listeners aren't even fucking Irish.

00:02:46 Speaker_00
It's mainly it's mainly in England, Scotland, Wales, Australia, America, Canada, by the way, of a UK tour announcement for 2025, which I'll announce in the Ocarina pause. So I have a very special guest this week. Again, this wasn't planned.

00:03:04 Speaker_00
This wasn't planned as some special 7th anniversary thing. It's just coincidence. I'm chatting with the wonderful Cillian Murphy. Long time listeners will know. Killian's been on this podcast before, he was a guest in 2018.

00:03:18 Speaker_00
I've done a few bits and pieces with Killian Murphy over the years. He edited a book in 2021, I think it was called Anva, the Book of Empathy. And I submitted a bit of writing to that. But Killian is back.

00:03:34 Speaker_00
Killian is back for a chat to speak about his new film, Small Things Like These, which is it's in cinemas November 1st. Small Things Like These. It is a wonderful film. It's based on the book by the same name by Claire Keegan.

00:03:52 Speaker_00
One of the greatest living writers. One of my favourite short story writers. My top short story writers who I'd be reading frequently and who are writing right now would be Clare Keegan, Wendy Erskine, Kevin Barry, Mariana Enriquez.

00:04:11 Speaker_00
Clare Keegan is a wonderful writer, in particular her short stories. I don't know if you remember an absolutely incredible film from 2022 called The Quiet Girl on Colleen Kuhn, nominated for an Oscar I believe.

00:04:25 Speaker_00
But that film is based on a Clare Keegan short story. She's an astounding writer. So Cillian's new film, Small Things Like These, is based on a Clare Keegan book. The story revolves around the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, mother and baby homes.

00:04:44 Speaker_00
This dark period of recent Irish history where women were institutionalised against their will by the church and the state.

00:04:54 Speaker_00
I touched on that subject in a podcast about three weeks ago, but it's a historical area that I'm going to start focusing on more, speaking to the right people about it.

00:05:05 Speaker_00
So for new listeners to this podcast, because I'm conscious there's going to be a lot of people listening right now who've never heard my podcast, and they're here because Cillian is on the podcast. you're more than welcome.

00:05:17 Speaker_00
Just as a heads up, I don't really do interviews. I try and aim instead for conversations. And when I'm speaking, I'm speaking to someone like Cillian Murphy, an Oscar winner. Cillian is a master of his craft.

00:05:34 Speaker_00
He is a master of the craft of acting and storytelling and performing. So when I speak to a person like that, I want to speak about art. I want to speak about the craft. That's what I try and focus the conversation on.

00:05:49 Speaker_00
And this conversation is about the film Small Things Like These. That's what this conversation is about. Regarding spoiler warnings. This isn't a spoiler warning type of film, this is a piece of art.

00:06:03 Speaker_00
It's a slow piece of work that I'd advise, I'd advise you to watch multiple times. So this chat with Cillian, it works.

00:06:13 Speaker_00
It works as something you can listen to before you see the film and it will definitely work as something to listen to immediately after you watch the film as a companion because we go in depth into the storytelling and the characters and his performance and just another one for new listeners.

00:06:35 Speaker_00
I am autistic, right? So I try my absolute very, very best to not interrupt when I have a conversation. I really, really try hard to not interrupt. But sometimes my curiosity and excitement gets the better of me.

00:06:52 Speaker_00
And I do interrupt, which is that's autistic people struggle with that. And I struggle with that. So please, please extend a small bit of understanding if I interrupt once or twice. So small things like these, it's out in the first of November.

00:07:07 Speaker_00
Go and see it. Go and see it in the cinema. All right. And here's the chat I had with the Oscar winner from Cork, Cillian Murphy. All right, Cillian, what's the crack? How are you getting on? I'm very good. How are you? I'm fantastic. I'm fantastic.

00:07:22 Speaker_00
You're on set at the moment, you are? You will out say what you're on set for?

00:07:26 Speaker_01
Yes. Yeah, we're shooting the Peaky Blinders film.

00:07:30 Speaker_00
You're shooting the movie version of it?

00:07:32 Speaker_01
We are. Yeah.

00:07:34 Speaker_00
Is that like a bigger, bigger production than shooting the TV series? Like, is it more different?

00:07:41 Speaker_01
Well, we have more time. Do you know, we did the television show, we would have, we do six episodes. So that's effectively three feature films. And now we're doing one feature film in the same time. Okay. So like on a film set,

00:08:00 Speaker_01
Time is the most important currency of all, and we have more time with this, which is lovely.

00:08:07 Speaker_00
Absolutely. I'm actually, I'm on set myself. Oh, really? Yeah. I'm making one of my short stories into a short film with Robbie Sheehan playing the lead. So that's actually what I'm doing today. Class.

00:08:21 Speaker_00
So that would be, that would be very enjoyable, but it's my, yeah, it's my first time working on, Jesus, anything that looks like a film set. It's mad because I'm used to television, you see, so having that many people is mad.

00:08:34 Speaker_01
And are you, are you directing it?

00:08:36 Speaker_00
not directing it, but like it's, so it was one of my short stories. It's called, um, did you read about Arsken Fogarty? It was my first ever podcast episode.

00:08:45 Speaker_00
And what a fella who drags a fridge from Dublin all the way down to Limerick and Robbie's playing that person.

00:08:52 Speaker_00
And I wrote the short story and I adapted the script, but I'm not directing it, but I'm, I'm, I'm keeping an eye on sets and just trying to not get involved if you know what I mean.

00:09:02 Speaker_01
You're hovering.

00:09:03 Speaker_00
I'm hovering because I suppose the reason I'm bringing up is like this film that you're doing small things like these, right? It's an adaptation from Claire Keegan's novel. Yes. I saw that like Enda Walsh is the one who wrote the script. Yes. And.

00:09:22 Speaker_00
I watched it and you've done an amazing job. So the thing about Clare Keegan's book, it's so quiet. It's so quiet and silent. It's almost there's a there's a Hemingway technique of writing.

00:09:37 Speaker_00
He called it the iceberg theory, you know, or the iceberg technique where.

00:09:42 Speaker_00
It's the emotions bubble up underneath, you know, you don't describe it, it bubbles up underneath, and that technique is very literary, it's very much about words on a page and the theater of your mind.

00:09:56 Speaker_00
But you've managed to nail it with the film like. Jesus, the character that you're playing, Bill Rice, Yeah, I later I worried for your mental health afterwards.

00:10:09 Speaker_00
I was like, but like you play this character who really has the weight of the world on his mind and he never he never expresses it with words. And I could even what made me concerned for your mental health was I could see it in your body language.

00:10:27 Speaker_00
Like when a human is suppressing memories or suppressing things. It forms in our bodies and the way that we hold ourselves. You were very tense. You were like in a defensive ball. Like, what was that like?

00:10:47 Speaker_01
Well, I'm glad you picked up on that because we worked on that. And I also like what you said about Clare's writing, that wonderful kind of economy of language that she has.

00:11:00 Speaker_01
Um, and it gives the reader an awful lot of space in, in her work and in her short stories and in the, in the novellas. And I think Enda was very keen to be faithful to that. I mean, it's a very, very faithful adaptation of the book.

00:11:17 Speaker_01
Um, and again, we wanted to leave space for the audience. Um, and what's. really interesting about the book and hopefully about the film is that the real, the real drama, the real conflict, the real, uh, the real story starts when the film ends.

00:11:40 Speaker_01
When, uh, when it goes to black and there's that dedication. And what I love about that is it's a provocation to the audience. So every time we've screened the film,

00:11:54 Speaker_01
you know, goes to black and then the credits roll and then people sit there and they don't get up.

00:12:00 Speaker_01
And, and then the discussions start and not just in Ireland because it's, it's an Irish story, but, but everywhere that we've screened the film, like we screened it in Berlin for the first time and, and all, and, and, and, and so people are invested in different ways, uh, in the film and different characters, and they have different points of view about what, what will happen after the film ends.

00:12:20 Speaker_01
Um, and then in terms of playing him, Yeah, I wanted to make it a sort of a physical performance. I'm very interested in acting with the body, you know, and myself and Andrew from the very beginning.

00:12:38 Speaker_01
we wanted him to be primarily kind of non-verbal, you know? And when the characters do talk in the film, they don't talk about what's actually going on. They talk in sort of banalities, you know?

00:12:51 Speaker_01
And it's perhaps only, there's only one real conversation, I think, about what's actually going on, and that's between Eileen and Bill in the bedroom. And everything else is just sort of noise, you know?

00:13:03 Speaker_00
It's noise and it's it's it's sad. What made me feel sad about it, too, is is so when a human lives their life that way and a lot of humans live their life that way, where memories and pain are under the surface but are not spoken with the mouth.

00:13:21 Speaker_00
Yeah. Bill has to engage in this, this performance of, of it's kind of inauthentic. So even he, he loves his daughters. Like it's very clear. This man adores and loves his daughters. But even when he speaks with them, there's no playfulness, compassion.

00:13:39 Speaker_00
Do you know what I mean? It's, it's, it's still quite direct and matter of fact, even when he's dealing with his daughters. And, and that's, to me, I see that as the, that's the consequence. That's the price that a person pays.

00:13:51 Speaker_00
when they lived their life in such a repressed way, when they repressed so much pain. Yeah, what was like? We all know someone like Bill. It's it's it's actually quite Irish that that character is very Irish.

00:14:06 Speaker_00
When you were trying to get into that, that character, was there anyone that you knew or someone from your childhood that you were evoking?

00:14:15 Speaker_01
Not directly, no, not directly, but I know those those working men, too, and Do you know what I mean? Those men that have, they've worked with their bodies all their lives and I kind of have studied them, you know, the way they stand and sit.

00:14:33 Speaker_00
There's the coal as well, yeah. Were you thinking about, did you drag a bag of coal around for a while? Like that's in his body too, you know, there is the little humpback.

00:14:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, we had one of the prop lads that worked on set, like miraculously used to be a coal man. So he showed, because I was like doing the full, like sort of actor-y thing, going, I'm going to work in a coal yard for a week before the shoot.

00:15:01 Speaker_01
And of course, there's no coal yards in Ireland anymore. They don't exist. So I couldn't do that. But this fella, anyway, showed me how to lift them and all. And they're proper coal bags.

00:15:16 Speaker_01
And anyway, uh, so there's that, that sort of, and then Claire Keegan said something really interesting. I listened to her on a podcast and she said that a simple thing that I stole was that he walks always looking down.

00:15:31 Speaker_01
And you know, that that's a very Irish thing as well. Do you know, walk, looking down at your feet, looking down at the floor, looking down at the pavement as you're walking and rarely will you make eye contact.

00:15:41 Speaker_00
It's a beautiful thing she wrote because it's so that it's A, he's a coal man, so he's going to be looking down at the ground.

00:15:48 Speaker_00
B, it's always raining, so we tend to look down at the ground and C, it's the Catholic, the Catholic repression, that the looking down, the looking away from the horrors that are over there.

00:16:00 Speaker_00
And also what I love about Clare's choice of making Bill a coal man is because I was thinking about it when I was watching it. It's like, why is he a cold man? He brings warmth to people and everything is fucking cold. Like it's Christmas, it's cold.

00:16:16 Speaker_00
But emotionally, everything is cold. No one is really saying what they want to say. No one is speaking about the injustices that are happening behind walls in Wexford.

00:16:28 Speaker_00
So Bill is the only person who brings physical warmth and then by the end, emotional warmth, you know?

00:16:36 Speaker_01
That's true. And I suppose if you're going to write a protagonist, you write a protagonist that has access to all the community's homes. Do you know what I mean? He's there. He's always in doorways.

00:16:47 Speaker_01
And he's the only fella that will have access to the convent and to the laundry. Do you know what I mean? It's a genius trick as a writer. How do you write a story like that? Unless you give the character access, how is he going to get in?

00:17:00 Speaker_01
Do you know what I mean? How are you going to tell that story? So it's just a brilliantly executed story.

00:17:05 Speaker_00
Something as well, too, I'd love to ask you about. So I've often wanted to do podcasts about Magdalen Laundries. Even last week, I made an attempt. It's so difficult to find information because so much of it is repressed.

00:17:22 Speaker_00
I went to art college, Cillian, in a Magdalen Laundry. I went to art college in the early 2000s, and this place had been a Magdalen Laundry up until 1996.

00:17:34 Speaker_01
Yeah, 96.

00:17:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, and I'm in there in the early 2000s and the shit that I saw, like this building is still in Limerick and Like it was only recently renovated. So it was renovated about eight years, maybe.

00:17:51 Speaker_00
And the college part was downstairs, but upstairs had been untouched. And I knew the caretaker and the caretaker let me upstairs. So I went upstairs and it was the 1970s, the wallpaper, everything. It was 1970s.

00:18:06 Speaker_00
And then there was a bathtub full of women's hair.

00:18:09 Speaker_05
Oh, my God.

00:18:11 Speaker_00
Yeah. And the other thing as well about this building is like, so there's a church, the church is now the gallery space in the college.

00:18:21 Speaker_00
But this church, if you were a crow looking down from above, you could see that the church was shaped like a crucifix, right? So the pews are basically different arms of the crucifix.

00:18:32 Speaker_00
And they had designed this church in such a way that there's little tunnels, tiny little tunnels going in underneath the church. And I asked the caretaker, because he showed me, I said, what the fuck? Why is there tunnels underneath the church?

00:18:42 Speaker_00
And he said, that's so the women could never see their children on a Sunday. So the women were in this laundry in Limerick. and their kids were in the same laundry, but they must never see each other.

00:18:54 Speaker_00
So even though they'd go to church every Sunday and the women could hear their children singing, they could never see them. And they'd move in tunnels underneath. That closed in 1996. And something about

00:19:07 Speaker_00
The film is, if I knew what year it was set, right, I knew what year it was set. But if I fucking didn't, it could have been the 60s. Like Wexford, the only thing that gave away in 1982 was. Is it 84?

00:19:23 Speaker_00
Near the end of the film, when Bill is talking to a lady in the pub, I can hear don't you want me baby in the background.

00:19:30 Speaker_05
Yeah, yeah.

00:19:32 Speaker_00
If I didn't know that, I'd go, this could be the 60s, this could be the 70s. We're not talking we're talking about recent history here. 1984 is not a long time ago. That's our lifetime. And it's it feels so ancient.

00:19:49 Speaker_00
I mean, what really jarred me was the nuns as basically prison officers, the nuns as people to be legitimately feared. Now, I don't I vaguely, vaguely recollect that from my childhood. But we kind of lived through this.

00:20:07 Speaker_00
Like, how do you feel about that? How much of your childhood was coming up here? Like, do you remember any of this extreme terror around the church?

00:20:17 Speaker_01
No, no, I didn't. Thankfully, I didn't experience any of that. I mean, you know, I. So in 84, I would have been. Eight or something. So I'm I'm I'm older than you, but I would have been about eight or something like that, and then.

00:20:34 Speaker_01
Uh, you know, but I went to, uh, you know, I was taught by brothers in secondary school and.

00:20:41 Speaker_00
So you did the Catholic education thing. Yeah.

00:20:43 Speaker_01
The full thing. Yeah. All the way up. Everybody that I know did, did, did, did that. But I think if you're someone that's my age, you're going to have one foot in, in, in two different worlds, if you know what I mean.

00:20:57 Speaker_01
You have the foot in that Ireland of the 80s and the early 90s, and then you have obviously a foot in what's happened since in the last 10-20 years, this massive progressive change socially. So it gives you an interesting point of view, I think.

00:21:21 Speaker_01
But do you know, I think we tried to be very careful with the film. And also, I think the book is trying to be careful and not not to not make it about blame, really, but more about kind of understanding. And, you know, it's very clear.

00:21:43 Speaker_01
that there are survivors who are victims of this abuse and cruelty, and then there's the people that perpetrated it, but the sort of interesting place is the people around at the time, and the sort of spectrum of innocence to complicity, or does that spectrum exist, or are we all on the same spectrum?

00:22:05 Speaker_01
That's interesting. Do you know, and so, but again, without apportioning blame, without being, sort of dogmatic without making it an angry film. It's a very gentle film, I hope, you know, and the book is also very gentle.

00:22:22 Speaker_01
And I think art should be gentle in approaching these topics. And there's a lot of people that are walking around that live this reality. So you have to be very careful about it, about it all.

00:22:33 Speaker_00
But on the other side of that as well, though, Cillian, is like, You've just come off the back of an Oscar. Fair play to you, by the way. You've just come back off the back of an Oscar, right?

00:22:45 Speaker_00
And now you're doing this relatively low budget film about Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. Is there a part of you? So I often wonder, is there a bit of an activist in you, if you know what I mean? Like,

00:23:01 Speaker_00
There's young British people, right, who listen to my podcast and they have an understanding of Irish history because they watched Wind That Shakes the Barley. You know, that reached them.

00:23:11 Speaker_00
Young English people who grew up with nothing but propaganda towards the Irish watched Wind That Shakes the Barley and now they're going, You mean the British soldiers were actually acting as terrorists towards the local population?

00:23:25 Speaker_00
I didn't know that. And now there's people going to be watching this movie who don't have a clue about the Magdalene laundries, don't have a clue that.

00:23:38 Speaker_00
I mean, what's often said is in the 20th century, Ireland had one of the world's largest prison populations. If you look at the Magdalene laundries that way, is there a sense of activism in what you're doing?

00:23:51 Speaker_01
I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier on about, you know, when the lights go up in this film, people are still sitting there and still, and then people go and talk about it and talk about it.

00:24:00 Speaker_01
And that's the sort of work that I like to make, if possible. It can't always be that way. You want to make work that has a point of view, really, or that tells stories, I think, that are of a human dimension. You know, because you could go and read

00:24:19 Speaker_01
There's plenty of reports on all of this that went on, and there's more being written, and there's more revelations coming out. It's like an avalanche of this stuff. But I feel like there's a gentle way to do this.

00:24:35 Speaker_01
And if people watch this film, and if people in different countries watch this film and decide to read about this, then that's a good thing. Do you know what I mean? Because I do think there is a universality in this specificity of the story.

00:24:48 Speaker_00
Mm hmm.

00:24:49 Speaker_01
Do you know what I mean?

00:24:50 Speaker_00
Well, the church did this in a lot of places just under different guises. Like if you go to Canada, for instance.

00:24:55 Speaker_01
Exactly.

00:24:56 Speaker_00
Indigenous people in Canada were forced into church run residential schools. Very similar situation, too, with indigenous people in Australia.

00:25:05 Speaker_01
And in America, in Boston, you know, it happened all over the world.

00:25:11 Speaker_00
And again, talking about complicity, it wasn't just the church. Like what I tell you, one of the maddest things now, I'm going to I'm going to fact check this one afterwards, but I know I'm 100 percent right. And if it's wrong, I'll delete it.

00:25:21 Speaker_00
But I am 100 percent right. One of the one of the maddest things that happened with with Magdalene Laundries in Ireland was remember playing that game Mousetrap when you were growing up? Remind me.

00:25:33 Speaker_00
It was, Mousetrap would have been like a board game you'd get at Christmas. It was not far off Operation, you know, one of those ones that are Monopoly, one of those ones that all the family would play.

00:25:44 Speaker_00
A lot of those games were actually made in Magdalen Laundries because the company who made them had a contract with the Catholic Church.

00:25:53 Speaker_00
So a lot of childhood games that we played, I can't remember the exact company, but a lot of those were actually made in Magdalene laundries. They were farming out the labor of these women, a bit like private prisons in America now.

00:26:06 Speaker_01
Well, you see, this is the thing that is hard to quite comprehend. Not only was the behavior abhorrent and appalling, but it was then monetized. That's the thing that is hard to quite comprehend.

00:26:22 Speaker_01
So hotels and everything would send in their laundry to get them washed. And if you're saying this is true, then, you know, so so the institution was making money from these these women. And that's the thing. That's the thing.

00:26:35 Speaker_01
They're always not my real name, Blind Boy. I'll say it again. That's the thing, Blind Boy, that always. Strikes me in these sorts of stories, it's always women and children that are the collateral damage, always. Mm hmm.

00:26:50 Speaker_01
And that's what we're trying to reinforce in this story. Even though it's told from a man's point of view, it's a story about women written by a woman.

00:26:57 Speaker_00
Yes. Yeah, because that was one thing that kind of flagged for me as this is a man as the saviour of this story and this is a man, Bill Farlong, and Bill Farlong cares about women because he has a bunch of daughters. His mother is dead.

00:27:14 Speaker_00
But it's on closer inspection, I was like, no, because because there's more depth to that. I think I think Clare included those details. I think for men, for men to be able to listen to this story more.

00:27:28 Speaker_01
I think you're probably right, yeah.

00:27:30 Speaker_00
There's a sense that some men only begin to see women as humans or even notice misogyny when those men have daughters of their own. And I was left wondering that about the character of Bill, you know what I mean?

00:27:46 Speaker_00
And that left me, it left me questioning the empathy and altruism of Bill. Men should acknowledge women's suffering because they're human beings without that being conditional in any way.

00:28:01 Speaker_01
Exactly, yeah.

00:28:05 Speaker_00
Another thing about this film, there's a sense of it going full circle, right? And I want to know if this was deliberate or not, because you've Enda Walsh writing this, OK, and Enda Walsh wrote Disco Pigs, which was your first proper play for stage.

00:28:20 Speaker_00
And then Eileen Walsh plays Bill's wife in this story. And Eileen was opposite you in the play version of Disco Pigs, too. Like, was that deliberate?

00:28:34 Speaker_01
It felt like the universe was kind of making that happen. It really did. So I've worked with Enda many times since we made Disco Pigs, which is now 28 years ago, which I believe. But I hadn't worked with Eileen.

00:28:50 Speaker_01
we've remained really, she's one of my favorite people in the world, one of my favorite actors in the world. And we've remained like really, really close friends.

00:28:59 Speaker_01
But for some reason, we hadn't worked together since we made that play, which changed both of our lives. And then when we came to make the film, you know, the character is called Eileen.

00:29:12 Speaker_01
And yeah, it just seemed to be the universe telling us that now is the time for you to work together again.

00:29:18 Speaker_01
And, uh, I remember we did the first, we did our first scene together, which was just me and her sitting in the church and the director, Tim Melance, who I've also worked with three, three times, but he put the camera on us.

00:29:31 Speaker_01
And he said, you could feel the history through the lens that, you know, he got it for free because we had that comfort or that ease or that discomfort or whatever that you get with a long term marriage.

00:29:48 Speaker_01
And a lot of the time, you know, you're playing a married couple or lifelong friends, whatever. And you, you went, you, you know, you meet the actor in the first day of work and you have to, you know, that's your job.

00:29:59 Speaker_01
You have to convey that and, um, make it, make it, make it feel real. But with Eileen, we got it all for free. Um, and I don't think you would have had that real depth of a relationship if it hadn't been her in it.

00:30:20 Speaker_01
And aside from that, she's just stunning, stunning actor.

00:30:23 Speaker_00
Oh, she's phenomenal in it, yeah.

00:30:26 Speaker_01
And, you know, the two real set piece scenes in the film are the scene between myself and Eileen in the bedroom where she actually finally addresses what's actually going on and we talk about it. openly.

00:30:38 Speaker_01
And then the other set piece is the scene with me and Emily Watson as Sister Mary. And they're just two phenomenal actors. And I don't think the film would be the film it is without them in it.

00:30:53 Speaker_00
I'd love to talk a bit about the character of Eileen because she's really into it. So Eileen's character, she's almost like Irish society a bit. I wouldn't say that. I'd say that the character of Eileen is, I'm not going to say cold. She's practical.

00:31:13 Speaker_00
Bill is about emotions. Bill is about, sometimes I don't know, is Bill trying to do what's right, or does he somehow feel that by rescuing or helping these women, that somehow he's bringing his own mother back to life?

00:31:31 Speaker_00
Like, it's very much related to a trauma that he suffered with his mother dying young. I think that's it. And then not knowing who his dad is. Yeah, that it's a personal thing. But then Eileen, Eileen speaks about money.

00:31:46 Speaker_00
A few times Eileen speaks about money. She speaks about the practicality of Christmas is very expensive. We need a few quid for that. We need a few quid for this.

00:31:54 Speaker_00
And then you get the sense of the price that that Bill, if Bill does what he wants to do, and I'm guessing what Bill wants to do is to go to the Magdalene laundry and rescue them all. But he's warned these nuns have their fingers in every single pie.

00:32:11 Speaker_00
So he will be financially destroyed. And then Eileen is right right there down the middle saying. Well, you kind of just have to you have to kind of turn away, you just have to move on with life and turn away.

00:32:24 Speaker_00
We're aware there's some type of suffering happening behind these walls, but you just have to move on with it. And that's very jarring because. What it reminds me of is obviously, like in Ireland, we've had direct provision for the past 20 years.

00:32:40 Speaker_00
I know they're removing it now and replacing it with something else. But direct provision was very similar to Magdalene Laundries in that there were these very high walls with people you didn't see.

00:32:51 Speaker_00
And you just got a sense in your tummy that something bad was happening in there. And we'll never know the full picture. We might one day. That's always been my vibe about direct provision. And

00:33:02 Speaker_00
Jesus, even now with Gaza and Palestine, you know what I mean? You're just like. Everyone's just like, just get on with your life. What can you do? What can you do? Get on with your life, you know?

00:33:14 Speaker_01
Yeah, but yeah, I think that is the power of the system. That's how powerful it was because the church controlled education, the church controlled health. You know what I mean?

00:33:28 Speaker_01
And, and, and sometimes the system of oppression is run by the oppressed themselves. And I think that is the case certainly, you know, in this, in this story and in a lot of Ireland.

00:33:41 Speaker_00
Bill is delivering the coal and it's Bill's business. It's Farlong's coal company. So he's delivering all this coal to the business. That's worth him a nice bit of money each year.

00:33:49 Speaker_01
That's the thing. It's what, it's what you have to lose. It's, it's the leverage that they have is that Like, what are you going to lose if you stand up and say something? And for this particular family, it's pretty much everything. You know, everything.

00:34:04 Speaker_01
And in that scene with Sister Mary, she makes it very clear that there's not much room, you know, in the school and that hopefully she'll be able to make space for the kids. I mean, it's a classic, completely. But it's just trying to,

00:34:22 Speaker_01
try to examine that, that asymmetrical power set up. Do you know how, how do, how did that carry on so long? And it's because people want to survive. People want to raise their children. People want to get through the day. People want to just survive.

00:34:40 Speaker_01
And if you like the eighties in Ireland were, were a very, very, very, very tough time, you know, because everything was closing down, everyone was leaving, there was no money.

00:34:50 Speaker_01
And so to have it, like you say, to have a job and to have a business, are you going to gamble all of that or risk all of that?

00:34:57 Speaker_00
Who would be the one to sacrifice themselves? I'm just going to take a brief, a brief interval here from the chat with Cillian Murphy in order to do the ocarina pause, which is I play an ocarina and then an advert happens. All right.

00:35:13 Speaker_00
I don't want the advert to jump out of nowhere and frighten everybody so I play a little gentle ocarina to lull you into the advert which is algorithmically generated I believe.

00:35:23 Speaker_00
I've got my big bass ocarina this week so it won't disturb any dogs that might be listening. So let's play the ocarina here. I've been learning to play that one. It's a tough one to play but I like it. I like the bass vibe of it.

00:35:53 Speaker_00
Sometimes I play these ocarinas that are too high pitched and there'll be people listening with their dogs and the dogs are going fucking ape shit. You know what I mean? I don't want to be doing that to the poor old dogs.

00:36:03 Speaker_00
So you'd have heard an advert there I don't know what for. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash TheBlindBoyPodcast. This podcast is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living.

00:36:18 Speaker_00
This is how I pay all my bills. It's how I rent out my office that I record this podcast in. It's how I pay for my equipment. This podcast is my job.

00:36:26 Speaker_00
And if you listen to this podcast and you enjoy it, and it brings you marth or merriment, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it.

00:36:38 Speaker_00
And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You can listen for free. Just listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets a podcast, the exact same podcast, and I get to earn a living.

00:36:53 Speaker_00
It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. One other thing, because Patreon are after changing the rules. So if you're if you're a new patron, if you're going to become a new member of my Patreon page,

00:37:07 Speaker_00
Please do it on your computer like patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast starting on November 1st if you have an iPhone if If you subscribe to my patreon on your iPhone on the Apple iOS app store Apple will take 30% of the fee so if if you become a new patron and you're like I

00:37:33 Speaker_00
Oh, I'm going to give Blind Boy the price of a pint because I like listening to his podcast. Well, if you're a new subscriber and you do that now on your iPhone, 30% of that money is going to go to fucking Apple, the dirty bastards.

00:37:48 Speaker_00
So please, if you're becoming a new patron, just take the time to go to patreon.com forward slash the Blind Boy podcast and sign up as a patron that way, not through the Patreon. app on the Apple iPhone. Thank you so much.

00:38:06 Speaker_00
And also having this podcast being listener funded, it means I'm not beholden to advertisers. Have you any fucking idea how many advertisers would want to knock down my door because I'm chatting to Cillian Murphy this week?

00:38:21 Speaker_00
If I was beholden to advertisers, if advertisers dictated the tone of this podcast, They're not going to let me chat to Cillian Murphy for an hour about art.

00:38:32 Speaker_00
They're going to say to me, ask him what his favorite, ask him what his favorite filling is on a chicken fillet roll. And then we're going to clip that. We're going to clip that and put it on Instagram. Fuck off. Go fuck yourself.

00:38:44 Speaker_00
Ask him questions about putting on the immersion. Fuck off.

00:38:48 Speaker_00
Make it snappy and quick like a radio interview so that that clip can go viral and we can drive loads of listeners to the podcast and you'll get the most amount of listeners and then we can push that back to our product. That's what it means.

00:39:02 Speaker_00
When advertisers dictate, that's what has radio and television destroyed. I keep saying it. So no, this podcast is funded by listeners. And when it's funded by listeners, it means I can focus on quality. I can focus on. shit I'm actually curious about.

00:39:19 Speaker_00
I can speak to Cillian Murphy about art. That's what I want to chat to Cillian Murphy about. And that's what we do. And that's what Cillian wants to chat about, to be honest.

00:39:28 Speaker_00
He doesn't want me asking him about chicken fillet rolls or when did you get your first shift at the teenage disco or The bullshit that Irish actors get asked on the red carpet in order to create viral moments for TikTok and Instagram reels.

00:39:42 Speaker_00
Right, quick upcoming live podcasts, 2025. Fucking Australia and New Zealand, that's sold out. Okay, so that tour is sold out for, I think it's April 25. So right, this Sunday, glamorous shit.

00:39:57 Speaker_00
On the 2nd of November, I'm up in Clare Morrison, Mayo, doing a live podcast. Very few tickets left for that. Let's get rowdy in Clare Morris, shall we? Right then, Vicar Street, 19th of November, up in Dublin.

00:40:11 Speaker_00
Fuck all tickets left for that, 19th of November. Wonderful Tuesday night gig. There's about, I'd say, 15 tickets left. Come and get them. Galway, Leisure Land, on the 9th of February, 2025. Ah, fucking, Drogheda, 21st of February, 2025.

00:40:30 Speaker_00
Belfast, the Waterfront Theatre, 28th of February, 2025. And then just announced my big, massive, giant tour of England and Scotland, but not Wales. I don't know why that is. This is for June 2025. Going to get hot and sweaty in England.

00:40:50 Speaker_00
Just announced 1st of June, right? We got the Beacon in Bristol, 3rd of June. I'm in the Hall in Cornwall. Fucking Cornwall, give me a bit of Cornwall. 5th of June, I'm in the City Halls in Sheffield, 6th of June.

00:41:06 Speaker_00
I'm in the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, 8th of June. I'm in Usher Hall up in Scotland in Edinburgh, 9th of June. I'm in the Glasgow Pavilion. 10th June, I'm in the Barbican in York. Can't wait to go to fucking York, man.

00:41:22 Speaker_00
Good, good strong Viking city that used to be called Jorvik. Give me a bit of York. Then down to London. I'm in the Troxey in London on the 11th of June. Then Bexhill, Bexhill.

00:41:36 Speaker_00
My tongue is hanging out for a bit of Bexhill on the 13th of June at the Delaware Pavilion. And then I'm finishing the tour on the 15th of June, 2025 in Norwich in the Theatre Royal. My England, Scotland and Wales tours, they sell out quite quickly.

00:41:52 Speaker_00
So get your face into a load of that. Back to my chat with the magnificent Cillian Murphy, whose film Small Things Like These is out on the 1st of November. Yeah. The way you say the film ends, right? And we're just left going, what happens next?

00:42:08 Speaker_00
And like, Jesus Christ, what happens next? Because it would have made the papers, you know?

00:42:14 Speaker_01
Well, this is the thing. And this is why people talk about it so much. And I don't know if I should. I mean, most people have read the book, to be honest with you.

00:42:21 Speaker_00
So I don't know what the rule is.

00:42:23 Speaker_01
Well, if you don't want to, if you don't want to hear about the end, skip forward now.

00:42:28 Speaker_00
But there we go. Yeah.

00:42:29 Speaker_01
But my feeling is that there's two points of view, right?

00:42:32 Speaker_01
My, you know, there's the view where he brings the girl home and into the house and, and then the parish priest is called out and then the cops are called and then the, the, the, she's taken away and, and the marriage collapses and, and the business is gone and he has to leave the country or she's, um, Eileen says, sees that this young child that's pregnant and says, right, come in.

00:43:01 Speaker_01
will take her, you know, and they keep going.

00:43:04 Speaker_00
It poses a very interesting question about class and class in Ireland too, Cillian, because the thing is, so if we look at that, so the film version, right? Bill, so Bill kind of grew up kind of posh, right? But Bill's ma.

00:43:18 Speaker_01
By accident.

00:43:20 Speaker_00
Yeah. So, so, so Bill, Bill is a kid who did not get institutionalized as a result of class. That's who Bill is.

00:43:30 Speaker_01
Also, but as a result of an act of kindness.

00:43:32 Speaker_00
There's that too. There's that too.

00:43:36 Speaker_00
If I ask my ma, right, so my ma's in her 80s and I ask her about these laundries and all this, something she said that really made me think was, well, it wasn't the middle class girls who ended up in the Magdalen laundries.

00:43:49 Speaker_00
It wasn't the girls from the quote unquote good families in the town who might be related to a priest or a doctor or a solicitor. It was the girls who came from poor families who were sent to the nuns.

00:44:03 Speaker_00
This is anecdotal and based on something my ma would have said to me, but if women who were middle class got pregnant before marriage, they could go to the local doctor and the local doctor would basically allow the

00:44:19 Speaker_00
The girl could have the child in private and then the doctor would ensure that the baby was sent to a middle class family somewhere in Ireland. And my ma said that that was well known what would happen. So it was a class issue.

00:44:34 Speaker_00
So I think with the ending of the film. I don't think Bill, I don't think that girl gets to live with Bill. I think because it's 1982. The girl is from the north of Ireland. She's a Catholic. The six counties, the Troubles. She got pregnant.

00:44:51 Speaker_00
She's been forcibly sent to the nuns in Wexford. Those writing choices indicate to me that this girl is at the bottom of the system. She's probably a poor working class Irish person and she would have been sent back to the institution.

00:45:05 Speaker_00
that you would have needed to have some amount of money and clout and power to be able to take a woman from the Magdalene laundries and say, this is my new daughter, I'm minding her.

00:45:14 Speaker_00
You'd need to have the type of clout and money that Bill benefited from when he was a kid.

00:45:20 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's probably the realist view of what happens after the film ends, I think.

00:45:28 Speaker_00
But then again, it's 1982, though, because you're really at the cusp of this shit too with 1982. Or 1984, even.

00:45:36 Speaker_01
But still, it's the same difference.

00:45:39 Speaker_00
Like when I was a kid, Cillian, right? You know I've been diagnosed with autism recently, yeah?

00:45:44 Speaker_01
No, I didn't know that.

00:45:45 Speaker_00
All right. I got diagnosed with autism. Right. And what that's done for me is I've been reappraising my entire life. I imagine so. I was a bollocks in school. Right. I was really, really troublesome because school just didn't work for me.

00:46:00 Speaker_00
And in the early 90s, when I was like seven, so I would have been in Catholic school, nuns, all that crack. I was so poorly behaved that I wasn't allowed to make my communion. Right. So that that's the fucking worst. Yeah.

00:46:15 Speaker_00
He's not allowed to make his communion for another year because he's so bold. And the nuns dragged my ma in and basically said, this kid is just so bad. He's so poorly behaved. He has no concept. All this crack. No one knew I was autistic.

00:46:30 Speaker_00
You know what I mean? Yeah. And what my ma always says to me is, If that had been 20 years earlier, you'd have been taken from me.

00:46:39 Speaker_00
If that was 20 years earlier, the word of those nuns would have been enough for the guards to come and say, this child needs to be taken away and put into an industrial school. And I never gave a shit about it when I was younger.

00:46:51 Speaker_00
But now I look at it and I go, she's right. What protected her was the early 90s. If this was the 60s, 70s, I'd be gone because the nuns are saying he's wild. He can't be controlled. There's a demon in him. You know what I mean?

00:47:05 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. And we all know what happened in those industrial cells. Oh, absolutely.

00:47:10 Speaker_00
I mean, how many people in these laundries were mentally ill? How many? You know what I mean? There's so much.

00:47:16 Speaker_00
I mean, there was there was women thrown into Magdalene laundries because they would have been considered too attractive, as in they would have decided that one there is too attractive looking. So just throw her in there. You know what I mean?

00:47:31 Speaker_01
Yeah. My mother told me that. like she remembers this expression when she was growing up, lipstick on the lips, a lipstick on the lips, dust on the shelf.

00:47:42 Speaker_05
What does that mean?

00:47:43 Speaker_01
That was the sort of way women were viewed. So if a woman was overly concerned with her appearance, you'd have a messy house at home. Wow. Do you ever hear this thing called churching? So there was this practice where

00:48:05 Speaker_01
So when a woman had a baby, she had to get blessed by the priest before she could go back to mass, but she weren't allowed back into mass. Before, until you had this.

00:48:16 Speaker_01
So my grandmother, who like was an eminently practical woman and refused to do this, and it's a minor, minor, small protest, but she refused to be churched before she went back to mass.

00:48:30 Speaker_00
Is it the sin of sex? Is that it?

00:48:33 Speaker_01
It's just about, as far as I know, it's about the woman had to be cleansed. Even like this is, these are like, you know, married women having babies, uh, but still yes, they were deemed not fit to go and receive the sacraments.

00:48:48 Speaker_01
So it's, it's just insane. So, so I'm sure along the way, there's, there's plenty of men and women that did. If you think about Edna O'Brien, do you know what I mean? She, she was standing up to all of this.

00:49:01 Speaker_01
And Sinead O'Connor was doing it, you know what I mean, later on. So there were people, and it's just that Bill Furlong seems very much ahead of his time in our story.

00:49:10 Speaker_01
And that part of the country is very, very, very different to Dublin and even Cork, I imagine. Do you know what I mean?

00:49:20 Speaker_00
But even there is, like what I was teasing at earlier, Bill Furlong is a good man, but I don't think selfish is the right word. I don't want to say selfish, but

00:49:33 Speaker_00
I think his desire to save has a lot more to do with personal trauma and his mother's death.

00:49:42 Speaker_01
Yes. And I didn't ever want to play him as a hero. I think he's actually a man that's in the throes of a nervous breakdown when we meet him. And I think it's all this. this grief about his mother and not knowing who his father was.

00:49:57 Speaker_01
And you know, it generally hits men in middle life. That's where all this stuff comes. If it's unaddressed, that's where it comes at a fierce pace at middle age.

00:50:10 Speaker_01
And I think that's when we meet him, there's this kind of confluence of crises that he's dealing with. And it's then, When he sees, when he finds the girl that just sets everything off.

00:50:23 Speaker_01
But I don't, it's like, I always feel like then he's, when he's walking over the bridge at the end to take her from the shed, I think he's, it's in his body, not in his mind. I don't think he's intellectualizing what he's doing.

00:50:34 Speaker_01
I don't think he's thinking this is a heroic act. He's just been driven there. And I do think that in his head, he's rescuing his, his mother.

00:50:42 Speaker_00
Oh yeah.

00:50:43 Speaker_01
Do you know?

00:50:44 Speaker_00
And I think it's, Paris are like a bag of coal. That was wonderful.

00:50:48 Speaker_01
So, so I think you're right. And I never, ever wanted to make him like a conventional hero. It's, it's a, it's an act of someone in deep, deep distress.

00:50:58 Speaker_01
And it's, it's, it is like the title of the book and it's, it's an accumulation of small things, small events, you know, that lead him to this act at the end. Um,

00:51:08 Speaker_01
It's it's it's it's kind of a it's it's his process of recognizing himself and recognizing the society society around him and also grappling with his own past. So it's all of these things are happening over these days leading up to Christmas.

00:51:21 Speaker_01
So it's just brilliant storytelling, but it's absolutely not a hero, you know?

00:51:27 Speaker_00
No. And. It's it's the other, the absence of alcohol is interesting, too, because Bill's character he really should be turning to the drink.

00:51:40 Speaker_00
If you look at Irish culture, if you look at like mental health system didn't exist in the 80s, if someone was to describe Bill, they'd say, actually your man's nerves are at him. Do you remember that?

00:51:53 Speaker_00
Nerves are at him, which was the catch all term we had for anyone with any type of mental illness. And then when he goes over the edge, that person had a nervous breakdown. Stay away from them. You know what I mean? That's all we had.

00:52:04 Speaker_00
And everything about him is he should turn to the drink. And what I found so well observed about the writing is He did have a sense of stability, even though his childhood was very sad and his mad died.

00:52:19 Speaker_00
He had a sense of comfort, space, stability and safety in his childhood. And you can I think that stands to him. And I think and books and books as well. An interesting one was how the character of Eileen raised her eyebrow when he asked for a book.

00:52:37 Speaker_00
But it was nice because it made me go, Jesus, does she know fuck all about him or does he give nothing away? And I think it's probably both, you know, like imagine being married to someone and you go, you're into books. Yeah.

00:52:49 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:52:50 Speaker_00
You kept that one quiet, did you?

00:52:51 Speaker_01
And she says something like, would you not prefer a shirt or something?

00:52:56 Speaker_00
That was interesting too, because the shirt wasn't for him. It was for her. When she said, would you not prefer a shirt? I knew that was Eileen's character going. I wouldn't mind it. You're covered in coal. Would you get a new pocket shirt?

00:53:08 Speaker_01
Yeah. But I do think that, you know, he was given that thing of like books and there, I think you do learn a huge amount of empathy through, through books. And this is only my own sort of backstory for him that I were working out that

00:53:22 Speaker_01
You know, and it's interesting, he's reading Dickens. You know what I mean? And that's very deliberate. But it's all these lovely little breadcrumbs that you have as an actor. Because like when you're an actor, it's like being a detective.

00:53:34 Speaker_01
You know, you're trying to figure out, how do I build this story? And how do I build this character? And all these little crumbs. It was amazing having the book alongside the script to be able to piece him together, you know?

00:53:45 Speaker_00
And something I can say for the film is like, even just there, the fact that you and I were able to pick one tiny interaction in the film and there's so much there, the film is incredibly literary.

00:53:58 Speaker_00
There is nothing in this film that does not have intention and purpose in it. It's incredible. And when you speak about the ending, too, We don't like those endings in films. We don't like that type. That's quite a literary ending.

00:54:15 Speaker_00
Like something I adore about Clare Keegan's writing and her short stories in particular, and it's something that I always try and aim for when I'm writing is I sometimes a short story should end the way that a weird dream does.

00:54:31 Speaker_00
You know, when you might have a strange dream and you're thinking about it for weeks or just pop up in your head.

00:54:36 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:54:36 Speaker_00
If you can end a story like that, you've won. If you can. And this film ends like that. I'm going to be thinking about this in three weeks when I'm in Sentra. You know what I mean? It just pop up and I'd be going, what happened?

00:54:48 Speaker_01
Well, I think I think if if something I think if something achieves the condition of art, and that sounds very pretentious, but if it does, it can haunt you. It can really haunt you.

00:55:01 Speaker_01
And it can stick around with you like a good film, a good book, a good song. And you're dead right. It is like a dream. It just colors. It can color your days and weeks after seeing something. That's what you really, really aspire to as a storyteller.

00:55:18 Speaker_01
You know that yourself. That's what you're trying to achieve, is something that will haunt people.

00:55:23 Speaker_00
Um, we've about 10, 10 minutes left, right? So I wanted to ask you the questions like, what's it like winning an Oscar?

00:55:34 Speaker_01
Oh, um, it was, it was, it was wonderful and bizarre and. hard to process, and I don't know if I've properly processed it all. I went straight back to work. That was supposed to be my coping mechanism.

00:55:51 Speaker_00
Is it freaky, is it? Is it a bit fucking terrifying?

00:55:57 Speaker_01
You have to approach the whole thing with a bit of joy, you know? You have to approach the whole thing without any cynicism whatsoever, because if you do, you're screwed, because there's no place for it, you know? And it's a celebration of work,

00:56:12 Speaker_01
Uh, it's people showing their love for, for a film, uh, for, for, you know, several films and work.

00:56:18 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:56:19 Speaker_01
Yeah. And, and that's what you got to go into it. Uh, like, and that's what I tried to do. And for me, it was strange because I think I did more press this year. in one year than I've done in like 28 years of acting combined.

00:56:32 Speaker_01
So it was, it was certainly a baptism of fire, but I chose to enjoy it.

00:56:36 Speaker_01
You know, and I had my family with me and I had a great team around me and, and I really felt profoundly the support, you know, from, from people, particularly in Ireland and from friends. And it's amazing because of this, the nature of the media,

00:56:53 Speaker_01
Every single person knows about it. You know what I mean?

00:56:56 Speaker_00
Cork didn't need it, man. Cork didn't need it, to be honest. Like, I mean, fair play to you, but fucking Cork didn't need that. Come on. I know in the context of Dublin, Cork needed it, but not in the Cork. Cork is Limerick's older brother.

00:57:14 Speaker_00
So any time fucking Cork does something good, like they look down at us and go, what are you up to, Limerick? I mean, we've got Cork back when it comes to Dublin.

00:57:23 Speaker_01
I'm not getting involved in this now. All right.

00:57:28 Speaker_00
And like you're someone who you like to focus on the work and the other parts that come with your job. I know that you tend to you're not too interested in this, but winning a fucking Oscar that changes your profile completely.

00:57:44 Speaker_00
Has any of that been difficult for you?

00:57:49 Speaker_01
Not so far, honestly. I mean, like I said to you, I went straight back to work and these two jobs that I did directly after it were already set and ready to go. So in terms of like worker, it hasn't changed anything.

00:58:02 Speaker_01
And I feel like I'm old enough now, like I'm 48 and I'm fairly set in my ways. I know what I like. I have a lot of collaborators that I continue to work with and will hopefully keep working with.

00:58:17 Speaker_01
So I don't think there'll be really any major change in any way.

00:58:20 Speaker_00
Are you able to go to the shop? Can you go to the shop, like?

00:58:23 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, like at home, it's, you know, sort of, you know, kind of familiarity kind of evaporates fame. Do you know what I mean?

00:58:33 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's Cillian, there he is now, buying a Fanta. Exactly, exactly.

00:58:38 Speaker_01
So it's fine. It's really fine. And Irish people are just sound when it comes to that, like they really are. And I think they kind of know what sort of person I am. So it hasn't been difficult.

00:58:47 Speaker_01
I genuinely and I, and I would tell you like it hasn't been, it's all been a really lovely, completely overwhelming experience.

00:58:56 Speaker_00
And do you, do you, do you want to take a break at all or are you just fuck it? What's the next thing?

00:59:04 Speaker_01
No, I'd like to have a rest. I'd like to have a rest next year for sure. Um, because I, I'm, I don't have the stamina for going from job to job and being on that kind of carousel constantly.

00:59:15 Speaker_01
This year has been a freak year because I've done, made like three jobs and had all that stuff at the beginning of the year. So it's a very unusual year for me. Normally I'll do one job a year and the rest of the time I'm just at home.

00:59:28 Speaker_01
So I like to go back to that pattern. I really am not that resilient or strong enough to keep going from film set to film set to film set. I just don't, I've never been able to do that. So I really like just being at home

00:59:41 Speaker_01
and being among people, you know, just being in that kind of flow of humanity. That's, that's what kind of, that's what keeps me having a bit of crack. Yeah. And just reading books and just doing stuff.

00:59:53 Speaker_01
And I think then when you, when you go back, you're rejuvenated, you filled up the tank again and you can go back to work. That's, that's how it's always been for me.

01:00:00 Speaker_00
And what about music? Like, cause like you're a former musician, but you're also a massive music nerd. Like do you have any desire to start making music again or anything like that? Or are you happy to be, to just be a fan?

01:00:13 Speaker_01
Um, I'm always making and messing around. Uh, and like, it's, it's, it's something that I've, that I wrote, you know, I, it was my first love and I really, the thing of sitting, Cause I know you're a musician as well.

01:00:30 Speaker_01
And the thing of like sitting in a room with friends of yours and communicating again on that nonverbal way, there's something that is magic about that.

01:00:39 Speaker_01
And I sometimes get it in acting really, really good when you're with really good actors and you get it on stage as well. You get this sort of connection, this sort of transcendental kind of connection with the other performer.

01:00:51 Speaker_00
Empathic flow.

01:00:52 Speaker_01
Totally. And it's nothing to do with words, but it's just this energies. But I think, You feel it much more acutely when you're making music. So I love to make music with my pals, because it feeds something in me that I don't quite get from acting.

01:01:08 Speaker_00
Was bass playing your thing, was it?

01:01:09 Speaker_01
I know, very average guitar player.

01:01:14 Speaker_00
Did you ever get into the band Micro Disney from Cork?

01:01:17 Speaker_01
They were a bit before my time, but yeah, very aware. I'm not that old.

01:01:22 Speaker_00
fucking blind bike, blind bike.

01:01:25 Speaker_01
I'm not that old, blind boy.

01:01:28 Speaker_00
All right. Listen, um, I, I, I, I leave you going now. Right. So that, that's like 50 minutes. I'd say we've covered everything there. Unless you want to chat about, Oh, that was brilliant.

01:01:38 Speaker_01
That was really great, man. You really got the film. It feels like you really connected to it.

01:01:43 Speaker_00
I loved it. I fucking loved it. It was great. And again, just to see, to have read the book and seen the film and to go, wow, because that was hard to do. That was, that's really hard to do. And every, every one of you nailed it, you know.

01:01:57 Speaker_00
And fair play to Tim. Tim is Belgian, is it?

01:02:00 Speaker_01
Tim is Belgian. And I, you know, you mentioned the Winnie the Chicks, the Barley there earlier. And that was made by an Englishman, you know, Ken Loach. And I've always felt that

01:02:09 Speaker_01
Um, not being Irish gives you an advantage, making these really peculiarly Irish stories. And Tim is a, he's an artist. He's a real true artist. And he did season three of Peaky blinders with me.

01:02:20 Speaker_01
And, uh, and, and he, you know, wasn't the obvious, obvious choice for this film, but I just knew that he'd understand it. And he had been through something in his life that really connected him to this, to this story on a very personal level.

01:02:35 Speaker_01
And he's also the way he kind of paints paints. with the camera, like he's really, really beautiful visually and as a director and actors adore him.

01:02:46 Speaker_01
So yeah, it was a really good team and many of the people, like the crew that I had worked, I hadn't worked in Ireland in a long time, but many of them I'd worked with over the years.

01:02:54 Speaker_01
It was brilliant to be able to ask them all to come back and work on the film again.

01:02:59 Speaker_00
All right Cillian, good luck, thanks a million. All right, thank you to the wonderful Cillian Murphy there. I thoroughly enjoyed that chat. That was good crack.

01:03:09 Speaker_00
Go and see the film Small Things Like These in cinemas on the 1st of November, only a couple of days away. I'll be back next week on time and schedule with a hot take. I can't wait to get up tomorrow morning.

01:03:24 Speaker_00
and start researching and writing for next week's podcast. It's an absolute, it's a privilege, it's a privilege to have been able to do that every week for the past seven years. I'll never ever take it for granted. I'll never do it half arsed.

01:03:41 Speaker_00
I'm so unbelievably grateful to get to explore my curiosity each and every week for the past seven years and hopefully for as many fucking years that people are willing to listen and that podcasts exist. Alright? So, I'll catch you next week.

01:03:59 Speaker_00
Genuflect to a worm. Blow a kiss at a Labrador. Wink at a Pine Martin. Dog bless.