The Shape Shifter

He’s been a zombie killer, a scarecrow, and a fiendish gangster. Now Cillian Murphy is chasing his white whale.

- Tom Sykes

CILLIAN MURPHY CRACKS UP WHEN I HAND HIM A REEKING, hexagonal gift from his native Ireland—a small piece of cheese, as olfactorily challenging as it is oleaginous—called St. Killian (pronounced just like his name).

“I fucking love cheese,” he says, delightedly. “Especially when it’s got my name on it. I’ll be eating this tonight with some nice red wine.”

He underwent a starvation diet as shipwrecked sailor Matthew Joy in Ron Howard’s whaling epic, In the Heart of the Sea, based on the true story that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

It’s a remarkable transformation for Murphy, 40, who has lent those perilously etched cheekbones and fiendishly intense eyes to such roles as the psychopathic Scarecrow in the Dark Knight franchise, a murderous creep in Red Eye, and, most recently, vicious gangster Tommy Shelby in the binge-worthy Netflix crime drama Peaky Blinders.

“The sensation of going to bed hungry is not pleasant,” he says, eyeing that round of cheese. “I would like to have to get porky for a movie. Not obese, just prosperously rotund.”