Acting is very much my life, but acting is what I want to do so to be able to say that is a really fortunate thing.
— Killian Scott
I really am not overly comfortable with attention to be honest. Paradoxically I’ve noticed this is a pretty common trait amongst actors. You like to let the work speak for you, I think.
I did a play in school. Then Dramsoc became the centre of my universe.
It’s terrible for people when they really love a book and there’s an adaptation and they don’t like it, because it’s almost like you have this personal connection to the original material.
I've always looked for roles that were far removed from me.
I think when you're a fan of a book you do have your own little version of the characters and I hope that some people feel we are the versions they might have imagined.
You’re always a bit nervous or apprehensive with something like 'Love/Hate' and the level of attention it gets.
Damnation' and 'Dublin Murders' are the first lead roles I’ve gotten to do. The more time you spend in front of the camera, the more you begin to relax in front of it.
What can often happen when doing accents is that you go too far to one extreme, so it becomes a caricature. It’s important to bring an accent back to a natural organic place so you’re still speaking like you would speak, just the sound is different. But your rhythms are not.
If you’re lucky enough to find success at a job that you love then I don’t think you have much right to complain, to be honest.
But acting had entered my world through older brothers. It was a basic thing: all that just looks cool.
I am Killian Murphy. One day, I realised I needed a new name. I was doing 'Under Milk Wood' and had 24 hours to come up with a new one.
There are ways of staying under the radar here, and they're effective to a degree. But if you're an ambitious person and you're confident your career is moving in the direction you want it to, you know the attention is only going to become greater and greater.
Politics is real. It has an impact on people's lives. It's harder to quantify the impact art has. Personally, I oscillate between two extremes. Some days I think it's very important. Other days I think it isn't important at all.
I had a wonderful, an incredible dialect coach, Brendan Gunn, from Belfast, who has worked with Brad Pitt and Daniel Day Lewis, and me.
Broadchurch' was very naturalistically shot, in many respects, whereas 'Dublin Murders' has a slightly heightened element cinematically, because there is a supernatural, ominous quality - particularly in the woods.
The thing I learned from watching Iain Glen and Brendan Gleeson, and Aidan Gillen and Michael Fassbender when I worked with them, there’s a huge element of leading something. It’s the atmosphere and dynamic you’re creating on set.
I mean, in all fairness, in the grand scheme of things, if the greatest inconvenience of my life is that sometimes people want a photo or a chat, then that’s extraordinarily lucky. It really bothers me when actors complain about it.
I am trundling in a good direction. I am curious to see how things will work out before I take myself off the tracks.
When you’re a working actor you see a lot of scripts all the time, but to get to do something that’s really well written it’s a rare privilege.
The most common experience in my life is rejection. I've done over 300 auditions. No amount of drama school training can prepare you for that, in theory.
I find it fascinating the things that capture people's imagination.
I had to act with a wolf, which made me very uncomfortable! It still does. I think about it all the time!
Every time you play a different role with different actors in different locations, you’re developing a greater level of comfort in the act of doing this, which is why you’re getting better all the time.
Anything that’s been useful to me as a person has been useful to me as an actor. Anything in the interest of your happiness will affect your work. The more comfortable you become in your own skin, the better you are as another identity.
