Cillian Murphy certainly has romantic-lead looks, but his filmography reveals an actor more committed to a diverse career. Many viewers will recall his portrayal of the twisted Scarecrow character in "Batman Begins," but he also played a determined survivor in Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" and a transvestite named Kitten in Neil Jordan's "Breakfast On Pluto." Thirty-year-old Murphy was born in Ireland's County Cork, and "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" was shot on many locations he was familiar with from his childhood.
There was a lot of muttering in the British press that the film's depiction of the Black & Tans was too one-sided and brutal. I imagine an Irish perspective would be different?
No, I think the people that leveled those charges, they never contested that these atrocities took place, and that the British forces carried out these acts. Also, many of the people who wrote that are in very rightwing papers, and it's not a part of British history they'd be inclined to look closely at. It's not "anti-British"; it's anti the policies of the government at that time. And it's not exactly glorifying the IRA. The second half of the movie is about Irishman against Irishman, and we see my character shoot dead a 16-year-old boy. So I think it's very easy to answer those charges. And I think a lot of the people who wrote those inflammatory headlines in the British press also hadn't seen the movie.