Sadly sometimes there is no getting around a bit of press. But I think this thing of having cameras everywhere is something we need to sort out.” He laughs again. I’m very happy and privileged and all of that. I don’t want to be like, ‘poor fucking celebrities’, that is not what I’m trying to say. I’ve been sat on the tube and people have started filming me. What I don’t like is people surreptitiously taking photographs, which someone said is like the amateur Stasi. “I really don’t go out much,” he says, “And people are so underwhelmed when they encounter me, so I’m very happy with that. “I like just sitting down here in the dark, coming up with the playlists.” To listen to him, you would think he sits at home all the time, making the odd furtive expedition to Tesco. “I couldn’t do live radio – I’d find that absolutely terrifying,” he says. He says the 6 Music programmes have been satisfying to do because it’s just about the tunes – Masayoshi Fujita to Al Green to T Rex – without any element of revelation. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library/Alamy Last man standing: Cillian Murphy in 28 days Later from 2002. I find it terrifying, because I’m not a personality, you know?” You do the work and then you have to go out and perform as yourself. That was never in the job description and I’m not very good at it. “What I find hard is getting up and being hilarious or entertaining as myself. “I love getting up and being someone else,” Murphy says. He is extremely diligent and extremely good at what he does.” “Cillian’s not silly,” says the actor Sam Neill, his co-star in the first two series of Peaky. He is not given to bashing his colleagues or trenchant political statements. He does not have a torrid personal life, or at least not one that has been made public. Murphy, 45 but with the career of an actor twice that age, has always been a nightmare for dirt-dishing hacks. Every man needs a cave, and this is mine.” “Oh yes that’s right,” he says, relaxing, just slightly, with a chuckle. “I think you did Jimmy Kimmel from it,” I say. “How do you recognise that?” he asks, with the haha-but-seriously-how-do-you-know? tone of a man wondering if he needs more security. Photograph: Robert Viglasky/BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions Playing a blinder: Cillian Murphy as mob boss Tommy Shelby. He has spent a lot of time here over lockdown, noodling around on guitars, scrolling the news about the pandemic and recording impressively eclectic radio programmes for BBC 6 Music. In the Dublin home he shares with his wife, Yvonne McGuinness, an artist, and their teenage sons Malachy and Aran, the basement is Murphy’s fortress of solitude. I recognise the spare white wall behind him, which is decorated with a poster for the band Grizzly Bear and a painting. His storied peepers – organs that have inspired countless column inches and exhaustive maritime imagery – are, for once, hard to discern. At a Zoom’s remove, he sits back in his chair, hair restored to luxuriant cruising length after the savage chop required for Peaky Blinders. You don’t get the impression Murphy minds too much. It’s just before Christmas, and the rampant Omicron variant of Covid-19 has put paid to in-person meetings. He is courteous and friendly, but without ever quite shaking off the impression he would rather be almost anywhere else. C illian Murphy pops up on screen with the discomfited gaiety of a man about to submit to dentistry.
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