Top 40 Cillian Murphy Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Cillian Murphy

2. “I like being at home with my music and my books. I’ve done all the partying, I’ve done enough partying for four or five people as a young fella. But now I like the quiet life.”

— Cillian Murphy

3. “I think it’s necessary to keep moving forward. I’ve always said that nostalgia is death, really for anyone creative.”

— Cillian Murphy

4. “My only two constants are to challenge myself and to try not to repeat myself.”

— Cillian Murphy

5. “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.”

— Cillian Murphy

6. “I’m pretty adamant to do an American accent because you get it immediately.”

— Cillian Murphy

7. “It’s obvious that if you’re going to play a character you need to amass information about that person and about their environment or their era that they’re in and use as little or as much as necessary.”

— Cillian Murphy

8. “I’d probably have been wealthier if I had stayed with law, but pretty miserable doing it.”

— Cillian Murphy

9. “I don’t know if anyone will ever sit beside me on a plane again.”

— Cillian Murphy

10. “And once you’re unafraid with death, I think your capacity for violence is immediately increased. Once you’re unafraid of death, you are a very, very dangerous adversary.”

— Cillian Murphy

11. “I suppose I’ve always been attracted to this sort of outsider in general – in literature, in music, politics, whatever – and to the person that is able to be relentlessly themselves. I don’t think that I have that quality, that strength of mind.”

— Cillian Murphy

12. “It’s always nice to be challenged.”

— Cillian Murphy

13. “The best roles you have to fight for. You have to really want to do it and you have to go after it.”

— Cillian Murphy

14. “I never make a distinction between doing a film in Hollywood or doing a film independently. It’s just the story. It’s always the story for me. The constants are that it should challenge me and I shouldn’t repeat myself. And the story should always be a story worth telling.”

— Cillian Murphy

15. “That’s what acting is about, Funny wigs and voices, that’s what we do.”

— Cillian Murphy

16. “I come from a long line of teachers. Not only did I not go into the family business; I had an aborted law career and I played in bands. ‘Disco Pigs’ was my first professional acting experience.”

— Cillian Murphy

17. “If you behave like a celebrity, then people will treat you like a celebrity, and if you don’t, they won’t. There’s not much to write about me in the tabloids.”

— Cillian Murphy

18. “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.”

— Cillian Murphy

19. “I will always love film, the romance of film, sitting in the darkened room with strangers and watching a story for two hours – that will always remain and never be eroded by television.”

— Cillian Murphy

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20. “Two weeks ago we couldn’t pronounce your name, but you were in the lead in a film that made millions, so we’re sending you all these scripts.”

— Cillian Murphy

21. “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.”

— Cillian Murphy

22. “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.”

— Cillian Murphy

23. “I feel very lucky to be making good work still. The confidence of youth, or that sort of competitiveness you get when you’re 22 or 23, the impatience – that’s probably been tempered. Hopefully I’m slightly better company.”

— Cillian Murphy

24. “My wife can see always how a part affects me personally because she has to live with it.”

— Cillian Murphy

25. “I try not to think retrospectively. It’s important, as an artist, to look forward, always. I do try to take work that involves some challenge. If you approach a piece of work and you’re going, “Yeah, yeah, I can do that,” then that’s kind of a red flag.”

— Cillian Murphy

26. “From a very young age I had an ambition to be a musician, and to do that professionally. That’s what I pursued until I was about 20, playing in bands that were taken pretty seriously at that stage.”

— Cillian Murphy

27. “Having started out in theatre, I feel an impulse to do it as much as I can.”

— Cillian Murphy

28. “At the moment I’m doing this space movie, so I’m obsessed with physics and space travel. I know three months down the line it’s gone. Then I’ll be able to superficially say stuff about space.”

— Cillian Murphy

29. “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.”

— Cillian Murphy

30. “There’s a lot of comedy in Intermission but it’s got this depth. It’s not comedy for comedy’s sake – it’s informed by something else. I like stuff like that.”

— Cillian Murphy

31. “I’ve had the pleasure and the great luck to work with some incredible actors over the years and you have to observe and learn and take something from it and try and become better yourself.”

— Cillian Murphy

32. “I think there’s such a thing, as a performance gene. If it’s in your DNA it needs to come out. For me it originally came out through music, then segued into acting and came out through there. I always needed to get up and perform.”

— Cillian Murphy

33. “I think audiences are a lot more intelligent than what we give them credit for and understand that an actor is playing a role and that doesn’t mean he can’t play different types of roles.”

— Cillian Murphy

34. “I like the little bit of distance that London affords me and I like living in a world capital. I like having the culture at my fingertips.”

— Cillian Murphy

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

— Cillian Murphy

36. “It was very much about performances, the whole ensemble thing was just great – everybody working together. Sometimes it didn’t feel like a film set. It wasn’t technically driven, it was very, very enjoyable.”

— Cillian Murphy

37. “I’ve always felt kind of safe on stage, protected. I’ve talked to other performers about this and they feel the same things, particularly in the live arena. I never get nervous going on stage to do a play. Doing film or television I’ll have more butterflies.”

— Cillian Murphy

38. “All I’ve tried to do as an actor is follow the good writing. That’s been my main drive. It’s not always possible, so when you do come upon it, like when I came upon this, you realize pretty quickly this is something you need to be involved with.”

— Cillian Murphy

39. “I think if you play characters, it’s very important not to ever tag them with any sort of disorder, or diagnose them, or whatever. You have to normalize the behavior to get inside the character.”

— Cillian Murphy

40. “You’re an actor who’s Irish, not an Irish actor. And you shouldn’t be limited by your extraction.”

— Cillian Murphy

41. “I don’t think they’d ever make a movie about Chuck Baker but I’d love to play Chuck Baker.”

— Cillian Murphy

42. “I’d love to work in America, some of my favourite films come from America.”

— Cillian Murphy

43. “I’ve never done a film for the money.”

— Cillian Murphy

44. “I always think it’s a sign of a truly gifted director when they can move seamlessly between genres.”

— Cillian Murphy

45. “I think every director has a different methodology.”

— Cillian Murphy

46. “Cause things look beautiful when they’re away from you, things look beautiful when they’re so new and things look beautiful when they’re away from you. They seem to stay away from you.”

— Cillian Murphy

47. “I suppose I’ve always been attracted to this sort of outsider in general... to the person that is able to be relentlessly themselves.”

— Cillian Murphy