Disco Pigs to Small Things Like These: Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh on finally acting together again
Eileen Walsh and Cillian Murphy, on left in Disco Pigs in 1996, have reunited for Small Things like these. Archive image: Irish Examiner Archive
We’re in a hotel in London to talk about but Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh are laughing together about a far earlier project. They're poring over pictures from their first ever photoshoot back in 1996, taken by photographer Eddie O’Hare on the Grand Parade in Cork.
The duo were about to begin the premiere run of the Enda Walsh-penned play for the fledgling local theatre company, Corcadorca, that launched both their acting careers.
“I still have that dress!” exclaims Walsh of a session where they goofed around in character by the city's fountain, and pretended to board a Farranree-bound bus. “Those pants split one night during a show!” recalls Murphy.
Unfortunately, after their debut play snowballed into an incredible success story, the duo’s adventure together ended on a bit of a sour note when Walsh didn’t get the part in the subsequent film. The role of Runt went to Elaine Cassidy.
It’s taken this long for the Cork duo to work together again. Literally, 28 years later (coincidentally, the title of a sequel film Murphy is working on at the moment).
Meanwhile, Murphy’s stint in the movie in turn led to his international breakthrough after he was spotted for a part in Danny Boyle’s horror-thriller It’s been onwards and upwards ever since, all the way to the Best Actor Academy Award for earlier this year.
Walsh hasn’t quite hit those heights but is still a highly-respected stage and screen actor who has a solid career in TV series such as and and we’ll see her next year alongside Christina Hendricks and Paddy Considine in Sky comedy
The Quaker Road native is obviously well over the disappointment but admits it did hurt at the time. “Not doing the film was a heartbreaking moment, but a hard lesson in what the business is. But at the end of the day, it never got in our way as friends,” says the 47-year-old.
Murphy and Walsh really have remained close ever since. Their children are friendly, and Walsh is also good pals with Murphy’s wife, artist Yvonne McGuinness. In fact, it was McGuinness who suggested to Murphy that Claire Keegan’s novel, would be worth turning into a film.
“I thought it would be a great idea,” recalls Murphy of a novel he says he loved for Keegan’s beautiful writing, and its disarmingly simple story that is actually so layered and multi-faceted. “But I said ‘I bet the rights are gone’. But then miraculously, the rights were still available. We just got so lucky.”
Murphy got the ball rolling on the nascent project and roped in Enda Walsh to craft the script. He then went off to America to film “I was on set in the desert with Matt Damon doing one of the scenes on a night shoot. He was telling me about this company that he'd set up with Ben Affleck. And I said, ‘Well, I have this project…’.
Damon and Affleck liked the script, and their Artists Equity production company agreed to back the film. Murphy was soon swapping the warm deserts of New Mexico for a set on the streets of New Ross, Co Wexford.
While there are slightly different emphases in the screen version, the film largely stays true to Keegan’s masterful book. Set in the mid-1980s, Murphy plays decent-skin coal merchant Bill Furlong who, wrestling with his own past as the child of a single mother, becomes entwined in a difficult situation with the local mother and baby home.
Walsh plays his wife Eileen, also mother to their five daughters. In many ways, her character represents the mass of Irish people who lived through those Catholic Church-dominated decades. She may be uncomfortable with some of what is going on, but this is how things are and they just have to get on with it. Anyway, life in those recession-ridden times was already difficult enough without taking on the all-powerful clergy.
The fact that most people didn’t speak out against what was happening might make it tempting to see Bill Furlong as some sort of hero. The one we’d all like to have been, who raised his head above parapet and did the right thing. A kind of ‘Good German’ scenario.
Murphy cautions against that viewpoint. Taking his cue from a podcast interview he heard with Claire Keegan, the 48-year-old actor sees Bill as far more complex character. “He's somebody that definitely has empathy, but he's someone who's in the process of grieving, this kind of very delayed grief. And he's also kind of in the process of having a nervous breakdown and that, to me, was far more interesting to play him that way.”
A native of Ballintemple – part of the same parish that contained the infamous Bessborough mother and baby home - Murphy is also aware of the hypocrisy that held sway in the culture of the time. “Bill is a Christian man trying to do a Christian thing in a dysfunctional Christian society. Everything is pushing against him to do something Christian,” he says.
Walsh had been immersed in similar issues previously for (2002), and has stayed interested and informed about that dark chapter of Irish history. During our interview she quotes lines from relevant books by Nell McCafferty and Bessborough midwife June Goulding, and has her own memories of the straitened era is set in.
“I often think about that my own mum and dad, and the pressures they were under,” she recalls. “And just the darkness of the time itself, because everything was so expensive – ‘Turn the light off; turn the immersion off’. I think it was really important to try and represent all of that in one woman.”
While had no shortage of harrowing scenes, is more subtle, with the awfulness largely embedded in the humdrum of everyday life in small-town Ireland. There is, however, a heaviness to the film. For both Walsh and Murphy, this doesn't mean the shoot in New Ross and Wicklow was in any way an unpleasant chore.
“With my experience, be it plays or films, it's that the more funny the thing is, the less crack it is behind the scenes. But then sometimes when you're doing really harrowing stuff, you have to shake it off a little bit,” says Walsh.
For she credits a “lovely” crew with helping to create the supportive atmosphere that in turn helped the actors put across some of the weightier scenes.
The resulting film has a far more indie feel than the Hollywood blockbusters we associate Murphy with in recent years, but it still manages a moving portrayal of the issues it tackles, and also presents an authentic glimpse of aspects of Ireland in the 1980s. Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ ‘Come On Eileen’ is the first tune we hear, and don’t be surprised if the donkey-jacket worn by Bill throughout the film sparks a fashion revival.
Murphy is obviously passionate about a project he is also listed as a producer on. The additional role kept him extra-busy with emails and Zoom meetings, but he enjoys aspects of the behind-the-scenes work. “I can't crunch the numbers, but I love just throwing around ideas. And I what I particularly love is bringing bunches of really talented people together and seeing what happens. That's the really exciting bit,” he says.
As well as roping in his fellow-Corcadorca alumni Eileen and Enda Walsh, is directed by Tim Mielants, whom Murphy knew from series three of The Belgium-born director also helms Murphy’s forthcoming Netflix film an adaptation of a book by Max Porter, the British writer the actor recently brought to Cork for events at the Sounds From A Safe Harbour festival he co-curates.
Whatever about taking on the role of producer, Murphy says he is in no way tempted to become a director. “I think the responsibility that is involved in directing a film is too much for me. I love sleeping and like the like,” he laughs. “Most directors can't, because they're just like ‘So what do you think the color of the teapot should be?’ You're responsible for every single decision.
“I think the best directors, they're born to do it, and they wanted to do it since they were youngsters. And that's not me.”
As well as promoting Murphy has recently been filming the Peaky Blinders movie, With also in the pipeline, it sounds like a fairly heavy schedule for an actor who used to limit himself to one film a year. After all the hoopla of a hectic pre-Oscar campaign with was he not tempted to lay low for a while?
“These plans were already happening,” says Murphy of projects that can take years to come to fruition. “I'm loving doing it, but I am a little weary. I think I will take a rest next year.”
At least he can take that well-deserved break knowing he has at last squared an important circle and repaired the tear in Cork's artistic universe by acting with his partner again.
- opens in cinemas on Friday, November 1
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