Cork actor Cillian Murphy is ‘not your classic hero’ in new drama film

It’s a cold and dark December in New Ross when we meet coal merchant Bill Furlong in Small Things Like These. Portrayed by Peaky Blinders’ Cillian Murphy, Bill is a man of few words, but is well-known throughout the town where he lives with his wife and five daughters.

As he’s making the rounds delivering coal, he visits the local convent which hosts a supposed training school for girls, ostensibly a haven for ‘fallen women’ – girls who became pregnant outside of marriage, sex workers et al – as well as orphaned and abandoned girls. However, Bill begins to suspect that the institution is actually a cruelly abusive Magdalene laundry, part of a group of Roman Catholic institutions for women that were run like penitentiary workhouses with strict regimes, poor conditions, and brutal leadership.

The quiet man continues to probe, particularly after he encounters a girl named Sarah locked in a cold outbuilding all night – slowly scraping away at a mystery which represents the cruel reality of an estimated 30,000 women who were confined to the laundries in Ireland from the 18th to late 20th centuries.

“I think it was interesting that it is written by a woman, and the protagonist is a man, but it’s really a story about women,” reflects Cork-born actor Murphy, 48.

“He’s surrounded by these amazing women and these five children. And I think what really is key to it is what happened in his past, what happened with his mother – he wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for an act of charity that saved his mother, and what he’s experiencing now is the sort of antithesis of that, what’s happening to this girl, Sarah.

He’s struggling with all these colliding emotions, and repressed grief, and isolation, and all of these things, and I think he’s actually kind of in the throes of some sort of nervous breakdown. It’s not your classic hero.

The historical drama film, directed by Tim Mielants and produced by, among others, Murphy and his Oppenheimer co-star Matt Damon, is based on the Orwell Prize-winning 2021 novel of the same name by Claire Keegan – a story which, Murphy says, “was fascinating to me, because it’s quite simple, but in fact, it’s very radical and unconventional in many ways”.

Small Things Like These is a portrait of domestic life in Ireland in the 1980s, an intimate look at the impact of the Catholic church on a community. Bill’s wife, Eileen, played in the film by The Children Act’s Eileen Walsh, represents the belief held by many in the community that you shouldn’t meddle in matters pertaining to those with power, lest it comes back to haunt you.

“They are, themselves, products of a Catholic upbringing, of the weight of the church on them as kids growing up, becoming these adults that are then terrified of the church, and the wider community’s views, and being seen a certain way,” says Walsh, 47.

“And so I think she is really worried about her girls, and almost just getting them out the gate... She is the perfect example of what the church can make, I think, which is somebody who’s just living in fear and not allowing herself (to) relax and grow into who she is, because she’s just constantly under pressure.”

Murphy’s performance as Bill – a protagonist with remarkably few lines – has been hailed as an anchoring point for the film, and the challenge of conveying a story through body language and expressions rather than speech was something that the Best Actor Oscar-winning star relished.

“That’s my favourite,” he says.

I love that. I love trying to communicate stuff non-verbally... If the audience can figure out what the character is thinking without him saying anything, that, to me, is like, you’ve won then.

“It was a real Irish disease that there were a lot of silent men around in the Eighties and before that, they just didn’t know how to express themselves,” he adds.

“It was a different form of pressure that they were under, you know what I mean? But it existed and it kind of built up. So I saying to (screenwriter) Enda (Walsh): ‘Whatever lines there are, just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, let’s keep him as silent as possible, and let’s try and convey his interior world through imagery, and through those flashbacks, and through the atmosphere of the house and everything else’.

“A lot of the dialogue is, incredibly, sort of banal. They don’t say anything. It’s all about what they don’t say, and all about the subtext. And that’s brilliant to play.”

Rounding off the magic of this distinctly Irish story is the fact that the project was filmed in its setting of New Ross, which Eileen Walsh describes as “a small gift, because that became like another character for us, really”.

“I think what’s amazing is that the design of the piece hasn’t been heavy handed,” she says.

“You could have gone overboard with (1980s) perms and white leather boots or something like that... but I think, actually, they really eased off on it, and it’s just a little capsule of time.”

“And we shot in all real locations, we didn’t build any sets,” adds Murphy.

“The house is real, the church is real, the convent is real. The exterior is the actual real convent where the laundry was.

I think if you shoot in real locations, the actors feel the vibrations of them.

Small Things Like These is in cinemas now.