Cillian Murphy wants to go for a hike. He's got a favorite spot, a hulking Game of Thrones sort of hill on the Irish coast, not far from where he lives with his wife and sons and a Labrador named Scout. I'm a few minutes early to the trailhead, and already the day has taken on a strange cast. An abandoned hotel sits eerily near the bottom of the hill, its few non-smashed windows boarded up. A missing-person flyer flaps on a telephone pole. The clouds come in low. I chuckle: It's as if I've found myself on the set of the kind of movie a young Murphy would have haunted with his distinct mix of calm and menace.

Murphy, 43, is a throwback of an actor. In an era defined by stars broadcasting their real selves on social media, he's carefully remained opaque. He's not on Instagram, or Twitter. He doesn't take photos with fans, instead asking if he can shake their hands, or have a chat, or sign something. He doesn't want to be famous, and in fact he actively rejects the idea that he ought to be.

Consequently, the public understanding of Murphy holds that, because he is usually a little spooky onscreen, and we almost never see him off-screen, Cillian Murphy must be kind of a creepy guy.

But here he comes, springing along the promenade with a smile, waving genially, carrying his tote bag. He actually calls out, “Hello!” The day seems to brighten.

Murphy, who was born in Ireland, moved back a few years ago, after some 15 years in London. He gestures toward the inn and tells me that he's been on plenty of shoots there. “It was famously disgusting,” he says. “They would rent it out to film crews because you didn't have to do any design.” We set off along a muddied path, and the scenery changes almost instantaneously: a mountain of green on our right, the wind-whipped Irish Sea to our left. The hotel is in our rearview, and we have been deposited somewhere in the ninth century.

“It's incredibly flattering to be in that conversation,” Murphy says of perhaps replacing Daniel Craig as James Bond. And then, a beat later: “I think it should be a woman.”

Murphy is compact, with a sort of coiled athleticism to him. We're both wearing Blundstone boots, but only his, righteously thrashed, look like a pair that someone regularly hikes in. And he does: For about six months of the year, he's happy to hike, walk the dog, and make pasta for his kids. During the other six, he tends to a career that's headed in an ever more fascinating direction. He spent the back half of 2018 on location in Manchester, filming the fifth season of the adored Peaky Blinders.

The BBC series, which streams on Netflix, features Murphy—as the early-20th-century gangster Tommy Shelby—in practically every scene and consumes an increasingly large share of his off-camera attention now that he's a producer. Still, he finds time for narrower creative pursuits—theatrical work whenever he can, like the alarmingly intense stage show Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, which ran in London and Brooklyn this past spring. A few weeks after our hike, he'll head to upstate New York to shoot the sequel to A Quiet Place, about which he'll say nothing.