It has been almost 30 years since Eileen Walsh and Cillian Murphy last worked together. Could time really have done that to us? It seems so. The Cork actors emerged in simultaneous glory from Enda Walsh’s breakthrough play, Disco Pigs, during Ireland’s transformative mid-1990s.
They haven’t changed so much. Murphy potters into the suave London hotel wearing his characteristic friendly reticence. I remember, a little over a year ago, failing to interview him as the Hollywood actors’ strike shut down all film publicity. I was waiting for a call from “his people” when, hours before the Oppenheimer premiere, the news came in that he was strikebound. Maybe it was a relief for him to be out of it.
“Everyone was anticipating what happened,” he says. “So they had moved a lot of it forwards. We had done a lot. We had banked an awful lot of press.”
We’re blabbing about this when Walsh arrives.
“Nice shoes!” he says to her.
“Thanks. Everything is in storage,” Walsh replies. “I have this and this. And I now have to buy a shirt.”
It transpires that she is in the process of moving back to Ireland.
“Our house sold really quickly. So it was just slightly panic stations. But anyway, the ball is rolling.”
Not every delayed reunion is a success, but Walsh and Murphy have every reason to celebrate their work on Tim Mielants’s Small Things Like These. Set in New Ross in the mid-1980s, the adaptation of Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novella stars Murphy as a fuel merchant who uncovers grim secrets about a local Magdalene laundry after encountering a terrified inmate sheltering in the coal shed. Weeks before Murphy grabbed his Oscar for Oppenheimer, the film opened Berlin International Film Festival, where Emily Watson won best supporting performance for playing the institution’s sinister mother superior.
Murphy is a producer on the piece. Did the job just appeal to him or is that a way of generating the right sort of work for him as an actor?
“It’s very much the latter,” he says. “There’s work out there, but it’s not always the sort of work that you want to do.”
I think when people call this a historical drama it seems bizarre. But it really does feel like another country
— Cillian Murphy
Of course he now has a hand in casting. Was it just a happy accident that Walsh, who plays the protagonist’s wife, and her old pal reunited on this project or was there a conscious attempt to bring the gang back together, given that Enda Walsh is also on board as screenwriter?
“I think it’s bit of both,” Murphy says. “It’s 28 years or something since we did Disco Pigs, which is phenomenal. We remained great pals, and we see each other all the time. But I was mad keen to work with Eileen again. And, when you read the book, the character is called Eileen. She is one of five kids. It couldn’t have been more perfect. I remember Enda reading it and saying she’d be the perfect person to do this.”
They come together less than a year after Corcadorca, the innovative company that staged Disco Pigs, shut its doors for the last time. Pat Kiernan, director of the company, was long an inspirational figure in the cultural life of Cork.
“Pat was an incredible worker, an incredible man,” Eileen Walsh says. “It’s a shame it didn’t survive. But theatre is going through such a hard time with funding – with having to appease the funding gods and not just create the work. Pat, in particular, is very much project-driven. The schmoozing and the box-ticking – as important as that is for representation and everything else – stunts creativity. Because then people are trying to create a profile rather than take an idea and run with it.”
Let’s talk about Ireland in 1985. When I emerged from the press screening of Small Things Like These, I turned to a veteran colleague from another paper and said something a good deal more profane than, “Gosh, Ireland was a dreadful place then.” He nodded and added a few more swear words. The country certainly has its problems now, but the Ireland the film is set in is a suffocating place. There is a terror of the church. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. A weight is forever pressing.
[ Cillian Murphy: ‘Moving home from London was the best thing we did’Opens in new window ]
“Let’s put it into perspective,” Murphy says. “It’s 1984 going into 1985. In 1984 you had the Kerry babies. In 1985 you had the moving statues. No abortion. No divorce. I think you were just able to get condoms, maybe by prescription. But it’s like the f**king dark ages compared to now. The film deliberately is trying to blur the lines. When you look at it, it could be the 1950s in many ways.”
That’s right. Even though I lived through that time as an adult, I was taken aback when I heard a contemporaneous pop song on the soundtrack. All this was happening at the same time as the Human League and Dexys Midnight Runners? Somewhere else, New Romantics were dancing in shoulder pads.
“Yeah, you hear Come on Eileen and you think, ‘We’re in the 1980s,’” Murphy continues. “But a lot had remained the same since the 1950s. I have talked to my parents about it. We were young, obviously. I was 11 or something. We were kids, but it was a totally different time. I think when people call this a historical drama it seems bizarre. But it really does feel like another country.”
It feels an actor’s journey to play the young, fragile, incarcerated one, and then to come from the other side of that … It’s a lovely thing to get to play. To play Eileen is to play an Irish woman of that generation. All our mothers have been so affected by the church
— Eileen Walsh
In the current century we have learned a great deal of distressing detail about what went on in the mother-and-baby homes. Margo Harkin’s recent film Stolen is just the latest in a painful trawl through that unlovely history. Walsh herself was superb in Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters two decades ago. But what did everyday citizens know at the time? Were Murphy and Walsh aware of the homes as children?
“Yeah, I was,” Walsh says. “I was aware of there being a place for ‘bold girls’. I’m the youngest of our family as well. So it was very Catholic. We grew up very close to the convent … which took laundry in industrially. I don’t think that was a Magdalene of sorts. But I was aware of there being a place for ‘bold girls’.”
“My mum told me this amazing expression,” Murphy adds. “She said that, when she was growing up, there was this expression, ‘Lipstick on the lips, dust on the shelf.’”
Good Lord. Meaning, presumably, that the sort of woman who would wear make-up wouldn’t clean the house?
“So think about that. If that was something people would say, that shows you how women were viewed. That sort of stuff, it’s just mind-blowing.”
To be fair (or ecumenical, anyway), that is also quite Protestant.
“Really?”
Yes, that sense of expressive display being a sin.
One can’t help but think back to The Magdalene Sisters when watching Walsh’s quietly resigned performance in Small Things Like These. Playing the most fragile and abused of the young women pressed into laundry duties, she offered, in the earlier film, a tribute to all those whose stories were never told.
“It feels an actor’s journey to play the young, fragile, incarcerated one, and then to come from the other side of that,” she says. “You have a woman who, given the fear and position she was in, could be very close to entering her own daughter in there. It’s a lovely thing to get to play. To play Eileen is to play an Irish woman of that generation. All our mothers have been so affected by the church.”
Here’s a thing. All three of us in this room have lived in London and have then come home (or are about to, in Walsh’s case). You have to wonder if we would have bothered returning to the Ireland depicted in Small Things Like These. The old country now offers a different sort of welcome. Murphy, married with two children to the artist Yvonne McGuinness, doesn’t entirely buy my thesis.
“People ask me that question a lot, and I’m sure it’s the same for you,” he says. “We came back for reasons that were about the kids and being near their grandparents. About having a quieter life. We weren’t motivated by politics or what’s happening socially in Ireland. We left pre-Brexit, actually. It was good timing. It worked out.
“It feels like an Irish story. You move away and you learn about yourself. You find yourself in London or New York. You do what you want to do and then you come home. It seems to be just a very common Irish narrative.”
But it wasn’t always that common.
“Oh, yeah. In the world of this movie all the young people are leaving, and they ain’t coming back.”
Who would return to – remembering Murphy’s earlier litany – the Kerry babies, the moving statues, to a country with no divorce or contraception? I returned weeks before we only just voted “yes” in the divorce referendum.
“When was the initial referendum on abortion?” Walsh asks.
It was 1983.
“I was six. And I remember my mum talking to her friend, and she had her 10 kids, all Irish speakers, lined up with eggs and flour to batter any pro-choicers who arrived.”
Anyway, a lot did change. It’s a small thing in comparison to the important social shifts, but we now live in a thrusting country whose citizens regularly get Oscar nominations. Just look at Murphy. Raised in Cork. Inspired by Corcadorca. Broke through with 28 Days Later. At the front of a Palme d’Or winner in The Wind That Shakes the Barley. A TV star in the Brummie gangster smash Peaky Blinders. It was not as if he needed to be introduced to the world, but the best-actor Oscar for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer surely altered how he was seen.
[ Barry Keoghan to star alongside Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders filmOpens in new window ]
“You’re going to think I’m lying, but genuinely it hasn’t,” he says. “I made a film in April straight after. That was already going to happen. So straight into work. Now I’m back doing this. So it’s been totally the same. It was a wild time, and it’s kind of hard to believe that it’s still the same year. But no. Nothing’s changed in any sort of dramatic way.”
I’ve been bumping into Murphy for 20 years, and his unflustered energy remains a wonder. Few Oscar winners have moved through awards season on such a wave of insouciance. Far from hurting his chances, his lack of interest in the fuss and glamour only endeared him to the pundits. But he must surely have found it a teeny bit exciting. You’re at the front of the world’s flashiest horse race.
“Yeah, it was: it was a wonderful time. And it was wonderful, I think, for cinema,” he says. “I’m really, really happy for Chris and for all of that. But it’s back to business. It’s back to work. And I don’t really talk about it.”
Classic Cillian.
Small Things Like These opens in cinemas on Friday, November 1st