Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh on revisiting 1980s Ireland in Small Things Like These and how youthful roles in Disco Pigs helped them play a married couple
Eileen Walsh as Eileen Furlong and Cillian Murphy as Bill Furlong in Small Things Like These. Photo Credit: Enda Bowe
“Washed my hands!” Cillian Murphy jokes as he emerges to greet me from a bathroom in London’s Corinthia Hotel. Eileen Walsh, his co-star in their new film Small Things Like These will join us shortly, but meanwhile we discover just how small a country we come from. Before he moved to Cork in the early 1980s, Cillian lived in a Castleknock estate called College Grove. My wife grew up there, and remembers him playing on the green.
“We left when I was about four, I think,” he recalls, smiling. “I had great memories of living there, I loved it. Great pals. It was all just green. We used to just run around in the fields. It’s changed a bit since.”