When Irish eyes are beguiling

Big-budget Hollywood directors have used Murphy's otherworldly-ness to create villains in such popcorn pics as "Batman Begins" and "Red Eye" -- deceptively mild-manner sociopaths with inner reserves of malevolent creepiness. In the rest of the world, the 30-year-old's profile is more varied, including the vulnerable transvestite in Neil Jordan's "Breakfast on Pluto"; Jim, the bicycle courier, his career-making part in Danny Boyle's zombie flick "28 Days Later"; and now, an Irish revolutionary in the early 1920s in Ken Loach's "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," which premieres Friday in the U.S.

Last year, that film won the Palme d'Or, the biggest prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and has gone on to become the highest-grossing independent movie in Ireland. It has also created something of a ruckus in neighboring England for its portrait of the English army brutalizing the Irish people as they struggled for independence.

Murphy plays a medical student who joins Flying Column -- a guerrilla band fighting the British, a posse led by his older brother. Yet the peace that follows in the form of the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 (which created the Irish Free State) pits the two against each other.

Loach is one of England's great neo-realists dedicated to shooting life as it truly is, mostly for Britain's poorest and most vulnerable. He rarely uses recognizable stars. In fact, Murphy chanced upon the part only because he hails from Cork, where the film is set, and Loach had asked a childhood friend of Murphy's to cast it. After seven meetings with Loach -- six in which he and other actors were asked to perform improvisations dealing with moral dilemmas -- Murphy was hired.