Cillian Murphy Quotes

I personally think if something’s not a challenge there’s no point doing it because you’re not gonna learn much.

Sociopath is a word that has sort of become shorthand for psychopath and there’s a distinct difference, it’s interesting if you look it up. Sociopath if you look at the medical definition, the profile of a sociopath is that they are supremely intelligent people that are also pathological liars, they have no moral structure and there is one more, they have no compassion or empathy for other people.

I don’t care if people perceive me as always selling out because I’m doing a studio picture. For me, the whole thing is you should be diverse in your choices; that’s the beauty of being an actor, you should be able to do that.

You need to be as clean of a slate as you can be, as an actor. You have to try to be open to every experience.

I don’t consider myself a shy person necessarily, but there’s something about getting under the skin of a character and allowing you an abandon or a sense of courage that you would never have in your own life.

I’m not interested in a good man’s life. I’m interested in contradiction.

Every Irish person of my generation and earlier, we were raised Catholic and we’d have to learn it in school, we’d to learn the catechism by rote.

I don’t have a burning passion to live in America per se but I would certainly like to work there.

I’m Irish and very proud of being Irish, but as an actor, your extraction should be secondary, really. You should be able to embody whatever character it is, wherever the character comes from. That’s always been important, for me. I’m an actor who’s Irish, not an Irish actor.

It seemed to work on camera. And there’s very few films – because you make a lot of films and you meet people and you work very intensely and intimately and then you’re gone – but there’s a few where you actually make friends, and this [The Fall] was one.

I’m definitely a frustrated musician, though it’s more in terms of wishing I was a better guitar player and songwriter. But I’ve never regretted becoming an actor instead. I think it’s been a more pure form of self-expression for me. I luckily found something that I could aspire to be good at, whereas I never… I think I’d never quite reach that level of artist that I enjoy in the music world.

There’s always a level where you think you can improve and do better. Certainly at the beginning… I did four years of straight theater without ever having a part in a movie, and I remember being far more nervous on a film set than I was on the stage. It took a while for that to become less so.