Cillian Murphy, the owner of the most in-demand eyes in Hollywood Steve Rose The Guardian, Saturday 5 November 2011 Cillian Murphy's eyes are more famous than he is. He must envy them. The rest of him is pretty well known too, but his eyes have inspired whole websites, Facebook fan pages and amateur YouTube montages. A Tumblr page succinctly called Fuck Yeah, Cillian Murphy's Eyes consists of pages and pages of photographs of the actor, looking up, down, left, right, blinking, winking, staring, gazing -- you name it. There are discussions as to exactly what shade of blue they are. "The colour of the sea on a bright summer's day"? Or, "The bluest blue of all the very blue blues"?
Yes, people really do have that much time on their hands, but the eyes have doubtless helped their host to find work. Danny Boyle, for instance, gave Murphy's right eye a small solo role at the beginning of 28 Days Later before introducing us to the rest of the Irish actor. Boyle later subjected those eyes to harsh solar glare in Sunshine. Frequent collaborator Christopher Nolan is another fan. Talking about casting him in Batman Begins, Nolan said, "He has the most extraordinary eyes, and I kept trying to invent excuses for him to take his glasses off in close-ups."
After intense negotiations with the eyes' agents, they agree to allow their carrier to talk to me about his new film. I meet Murphy and his peepers in a cafe in Queen's Park, London. When I walk in,
he is standing in the queue, on his own, casually dressed, looking as ordinary and unobtrusive as he can. He's not even wearing shades. As he sits down, the eyes are busy looking into his cappuccino, and I try to sneak in a question about them to Murphy.
"Christopher Nolan says he loves your eyes," I begin.
"That's very nice of him," he says, not looking up.
You must get a lot of that. "Occasionally, yup." The eyes dart in the direction of the door.
"It's not something I think about too much to be honest." If the eyes aren't comfortable with interviews, nor is their host, particularly.
He seems almost embarrassed to be a well-known movie star, hence the down-to-earth rendezvous. He's relaxed and friendly, but slightly self-conscious and careful with his answers, if not downright evasive at times. "I don't bother answering this question any more," he replies politely when I ask him about his movie heroes. "You miss someone out and then you end up working with them."
"I'm pretty shit at these hypothetical questions," he says later, when presented with one.
"I need time to consider them." 
Hypothetical questions are a necessary by-product of Murphy's latest role. In Time, directed by Andrew "Gattaca" Niccol, is about as hypothetical as you can get. It's set in a future world where time is literally money. People pay for things with their own lifetime. Everyone stops aging at 25, after which they they must top up their minutes or die. So the poor underclass never have more than a few hours on their clocks (handily displayed in glowing numbers along the wrist), and thus have to work to top up the minutes, while to be super-rich means that you have whole years at your disposal. It's like some bleak fusion of Logan's Run and T-Mobile. And keeping this pay-as-you-go dystopia ticking along are "timekeepers" like Murphy -- the evil lawman out to thwart Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried's Bonnie and Clyde-like time-crime spree.
"I was attracted to the concept," Murphy says. "There's not that many original ideas in scripts these days, and when I do come across one, I'm drawn to it.
And all of the action stuff is good fun. Running around in a big leather coat and boots, shooting and fighting and driving. It's always a craic when you feel like you're actually 'making a movie', in the cliched sense."
In Time's big concept is rich with allusions, especially as it's set in LA, a city where pursuit of youth is hardly a fiction. But it does raise a distracting number of questions: if you only had two hours on your clock, would you really take a bus? How exactly are the rich people getting rich?
How does Amanda Seyfried manage to escape while wearing five-inch heels? Was Murphy inundating director Andrew Niccol with questions like that? "I can tend to be a bit like the logic police in films," he smiles, lowering the eyes and measuring his words carefully. "But when it's a writer-director and it's come straight from their imagination, you have to ... defer to their superior knowledge of the material."
Murphy has never particularly been a sci-fi geek. He likes classics like 2001 and Alien but he never watched Star Trek as a kid, he says. He didn't really even have a burning desire to act growing up; he really wanted to be a rock star. After an "ill-advised" diversion into studying law for a year, Murphy found his place on stage with the lead role in Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs in his hometown of Cork. "I just kind of pestered the director, who I knew vaguely, and he gave me an audition and I got the part. A lucky break."
Acting seems to have come naturally, then, and combined with Murphy's other natural assets, it's no surprise he is where he is.
It's not just the eyes; there's an ageless, almost effeminate beauty to him. Murphy's eternal youthfulness has attracted allegations that he is secretly a vampire, but it also allows him to pass for a 25-year-old in In Time, despite being 10 years older.
He's somehow too unconventional-looking for regular romantic leading roles, though – too angelic, or insufficiently macho, perhaps. That could be a factor in his varied and interesting CV. He plays regular characters, of course, most notably in Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley, but m
ore often than not, his movies have involved some sort of high-wire act. Those androgynous looks helped him play a resilient 1970s transvestite in Breakfast On Pluto, for example.
But he's undercut this boyish charm to brilliant effect in some bad-guy roles, such as plane thriller Red Eye, or as Batman's Scarecrow. And above all, he's looked at home in outlandish hypothetical scenarios: the conceptual labyrinths of Inception, the post-apocalyptic Britain of 28 Days Later, the comic-book world of Batman … In Time is another – and he's a bad guy to boot.
"I was trying to think about this," says Murphy, mindful of the pattern.
"It's never conscious, but when you look back … It must be that I just like those big ideas. I guess I like the idea of trying to create a whole new world where a whole different set of rules apply." Talking of Batman, what about those rumours that he's been spotted on the set of Christopher Nolan's current movie, The Dark Knight Rises? Having figured in the two previous Batman movies and Inception,
it's hardly a stretch to imagine the Scarecrow returning. Is it, Cillian? The eyes look down into his coffee again. "Uh-huh … yeah," he smiles, pausing to formulate his Sphinx-like reply.
"I think there's enough rumours floating around about that film without me adding to it, so, that's all I'll say." 
Well, it was worth a try. As Inception should have taught us, Murphy is a veteran at fending off unwanted intrusions into his brain. With that, the eyes are looking at the watch and towards the door. Time to go. They've said too much already.
Source: The Guardian It's a long interview but I bolded some parts for the TL;DR crowd. And it's worth reading, tbh. 
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