At close range his eyes – a pair of numinous peepers that have inspired fan sites and a Tumblr page called F--- Yeah, Cillian Murphy’s Eyes – live up to their reputation. They are cornflower blue and seemingly illuminated by an internal light source. When they’re combined with his prominent cheekbones and a pre-Peaky haircut that sweeps across his forehead and falls over his ears, one has to concede that he is a very handsome man. Murphy, to his credit, doesn’t seem to worry a great deal about his image. He arrives at the café on a bicycle and joins the queue for coffee. He’s wearing a dark green parka, a black T-shirt and black skinny jeans, the outfit of a dishy dad who likes to listen to Radiohead’s more challenging albums. No one in the crowded café gives him a second glance, which is just how he likes it. One has to concede he is a very handsome man. Credit:Nicky J. Sims/Getty He tells me that one of the attractions of his role in A Quiet Place Part II, the upcoming sequel to 2018’s hit science-fiction horror movie about a breed of terrifying aliens whose acute hearing forces humans to live in perpetual silence, was the opportunity to kick grooming and fancy costumes to the kerb for a few months. As Emmett, a gun-toting survivor of the alien onslaught, he sports a beard, a baseball cap and a grimy T-shirt and jeans. He says he was a huge fan of the original movie, which he watched with his sons at a cinema in Dublin. He even composed an email to John Krasinski – the American actor who directed the film and starred in it alongside his wife Emily Blunt – telling him how much he loved it, but the message was never sent. “I just chickened out; I thought it was cheesy,” he laughs. “Then a year later he [Krasinski] emailed me about the part, so there was some kind of weird circular thing happening.”

Murphy is reluctant to reveal too much about the sequel – “I’m very anti spoilers” – but says Blunt’s character, Evelyn Abbott, has to deal with the threat of other human survivors as well as the marauding aliens. “It’s a common narrative trope in apocalypse movies where you realise the humans are worse than the aliens or the virus,” he says. “Evelyn knows what the threat is in terms of the aliens, but it’s harder to quantify the threat of other people.” Murphy believes that, as an actor, he is still a work in progress. “It’s a constant course of learning and hopefully improving,” he says. Apocalypses have been good to Murphy, he admits. He got his big break in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, the 2002 horror movie in which he played a bike courier who wakes from a coma to find the UK has been ravaged by a virus called The Rage. Murphy sports a hairier look in A Quiet Place Part II. Since then, he’s played the evil Scarecrow in the three Batman movies directed by Christopher Nolan, a terrorist on a plane in 2005’s Red Eye and a shell-shocked soldier in Nolan’s 2017 feature Dunkirk. He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal of a transvestite called Kitten in director Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto and had a lead role in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach’s Palme D’Or-winning drama about the Irish war of independence. One of his favourite quotes, which he attributes to the late American director Sydney Pollack, is: “It takes 30 years to make an actor.” Murphy began treading the boards at 19 so, despite his success, he believes he’s still a work in progress. “It’s a constant course of learning and hopefully improving,” he says in his calm, measured brogue.

Murphy was born and raised in Cork in the south-west of Ireland, where his father worked for the Irish department of education and his mother taught French. Murphy enrolled in a law degree at University College Cork, not because he wanted to be a lawyer, but because it was “expected” and the number of lectures was far from onerous. That left plenty of time for rehearsals with his band, a Frank Zappa-influenced outfit called Sons of Mr Green Genes. Loading In the summer of 1996 several events sent him in an entirely new direction. He failed his first-year law exams and met his future wife, Yvonne, at one of the band’s gigs. His nascent career as a rock star was derailed when Mr Green Genes turned down a five-album deal with a record label because one of its members – Murphy’s younger brother Paidi – would have to quit school to pursue it. Was it frustrating to have his rock ’n’ roll dreams thwarted? “Yeah, but there was nothing we could do,” he says. “It [the record deal] wasn’t big money or anything. It just so happened that there was a brief window where the kind of music we made was cool. I’d seen friends in bands sign deals and then get dropped really quickly. So, I was aware that while it seemed appealing on paper it could end badly.” Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt) brave the unknown in A Quiet Place Part II.

Murphy had appeared in several plays at university and re-channelled his energy into acting. He managed to get cast in a production of Disco Pigs, a two-hander by a then unknown playwright called Enda Walsh, about two inseparable Cork teenagers. The play proved a sensation at the 1997 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and its two unknown stars – Murphy and Eileen Walsh – found themselves touring the world. “At first I was just trying out acting, then I got heavily into it,” he says. “It replaced a lot of the things I’d lost performing with the band. I was getting feedback from the audience, but I wasn’t relying on my own creation – I was interpreting words written by someone else. I went straight from the band not working out into something [touring with a small theatre company] that felt very akin to the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. It was a huge success, so it was unbelievably lucky.” Murphy reprised his role in the acclaimed movie version of Disco Pigs, released in 2001. His performance caught the attention of Danny Boyle and he appeared in 28 Days Later the following year. Early on, he found acting all-consuming, he says. He still finds theatre draining and is recovering from the physical and emotional demands of Grief is the Thing with Feathers, a play based on the award-winning novel by Max Porter about a father of two young boys whose wife dies suddenly. The stage production, which ran in London and New York, also earned rave reviews. “Theatre is one of those things that you need to be totally in love with because it’s such an insane idea – telling the same story every night live on stage in front of strangers,” he says. “It’s f------ weird. If you’ve any misgivings about it or you’re slightly broken by it, you should stay away until you fall back in love with it.” Paul Anderson (Arthur Shelby), Cillian Murphy (Tommy Shelby) and Helen McCrory (Polly Gray) in Peaky Blinders. Credit: Robert Viglasky

Mostly, he achieves a healthy balance between work and family life in Monkstown. Despite the international success of Peaky Blinders, he has avoided becoming a celebrity, or rather the kind of celebrity favoured by the magazines sold next to the till at supermarkets. Sure, he gets noticed when he’s got the Tommy Shelby haircut, but he’s learned to disguise himself with a hoodie. He doesn’t do selfies with fans, preferring to shake hands. For years he refused to appear on TV chat shows, a rule he has softened, but not entirely abandoned. “My argument back then was ‘I’ll be sh--’,” he says laughing. “I’d do a terrible interview that would backfire on us because people wouldn’t go and see the film.” He says his life is “incredibly dull” when he’s not working. His kids aren’t particularly interested in their father’s day job, although they might accompany him to the premiere of A Quiet Place Part II in London because they loved the first film. “I used to panic before interviews, but now I know how to set parameters for what I will talk about and steer the conversation,” he explains. “Someone said to me very early on, ‘They’ll only treat you like a celebrity if you behave like one’. That stuck with me. Act like a normal person and you’ll get treated like a normal person.” Outside the café he shakes my hand, slips on a pair of sunglasses and walks up the street to unlock his bike. Normality has claimed him once again. A Quiet Place Part II opens on March 19.