Days of the living dead

Animal rights activists unwittingly release a chimpanzee infected with a virulent genetically-engineered plague. Twenty-eight days later, bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes alone in a London hospital, and discovers that the city is now decidedly apocalyptic in aspect and utterly de-populated. Unless of course, you count the infected, and the kick-arse, Ripley-style heroine (Naomie Harris) who’s about to save Jim’s life.

Welcome to the world as envisaged by 28 Days Later, the latest offering from director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Shallow Grave) and his second-time collaborator Alex Garland (The Beach). The movie is an impressive slice of British sci-fi containing echoes of everything from John Wyndham’s Day Of The Triffids, Carnival Of Souls via Resident Evil and lashings of Romero flicks.

While 28 Days Later is immediately recognizable as a zombie movie, this is not merely a pastiche effort, as Boyle and Garland have set about updating the formula by incorporating oodles of fast-cuts, a soundtrack that boasts the unfeasably fashionable Godspeed You Black Emperor and a hip young cast in Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris.

Cillian, the young Cork-born actor, is already well-known to Irish audiences through his work in Over The Edge and Disco Pigs, while Naomie has recently attracted reviews of the swooning variety for her role in the television adaptation of White Teeth, and can be seen later this month in a major new BBC drama, The Project. Movie House caught up with the pair on a recent visit to Dublin to talk about ethnicity, dropping out of college and of course, zombies.

TB: Horror movies generally and zombie movies in particular, tend to be regarded as somewhere between softporn and hardporn in the respectability stakes. Was it a risky venture for you two, doing a film like this?

NH: No, in my case it was, ‘Oh, wow, this is written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle and produced by Andrew Macdonald’, and also the fact that the script when we read it was just so fantastic. I don’t think either of us had that feeling at all.

CM: No, I didn’t think it was risky either, and I didn’t see it as a zombie film, I just read it as a great part and a great story ‘cause it was such a page-turner. That didn’t even enter my head to be honest. This is really a tried and tested team, and they have an audience already, really.

TB: Your characters in 28 Days Later are both interesting. One is a kind of tabula rasa, and the other is a machete-wielding chick. How much did the machete inspire you to take the role, Naoimie?

NH: Well yeah, that aspect was interesting, and the jump to get from me to her was quite tough, especially because you never explore what Selena was like before this all happened. It became a matter of sitting in my room and inventing a past for her really.

TB: Your character, Cillian, makes a fairly impressive transition from being completely passive to being a damsel rescuer?

CM: Well, it’s just that he wakes up and all bets are off really. And he really wants to find some kind of social system where he belongs. He goes looking for his family and then he finds Selena and Mark, but that community is cut apart by infection, and then he finds Brendan (Gleeson, playing a cockney survivor of the infection) who is just like the best dad figure ever – powerful and warm. So, in the end he has to strike out on his own, and he becomes the alpha-male and he realises that if you want something done, you have to go and fucking do it yourself.

TB: You both started acting quite young, was it something you always knew that you wanted to do?

NH: For me, I never knew a time when I didn’t want to be acting.

CM: No, I wanted to be in a band for years and years. I was in one, in fact, in Cork, and then I was in college doing a law degree before I did this play called Disco Pigs and then I thought I might as well give this a go, so it was more by chance than anything that I fell into this.

TB: In 28 Days Later your character has to be the sanest, least demented you have played...

CM: It’s not really, because I did a character in a BBC drama last year which was quite sedate. But I’m glad you said that, because a lot of people have drawn parallels between Pig and my character in On The Edge and this guy, where I don’t see any parallels.

TB: Do you find yourself drawn to extreme characters?

CM: Nooo! Honestly, it was just those roles (Disco Pigs, Over The Edge) and they were two good scripts and they came back-to-back. I do think in situations where the stakes are raised and it’s more intense and there’s more to gain or lose, the potential for drama is higher, and it’s nice as an actor to explore those parts of your mind that you wouldn’t in everyday life unless you were a nutter, but I don’t make a speciality of it.

TB: Naomie, you studied social and political science at Cambridge. It’s not the most obvious choice for someone who has been acting since age 11?

NH: No, it’s not! I didn’t actually have any intention of doing A-levels at all, I just wanted to leave school at 16 and go straight into acting, but my mum begged me to go and do my A-levels and I thought, ‘Well, if it’s the only thing she’s ever really asked me to do I’ll do it’, and I just fell in love with sociology and I had this amazing sociology teacher who was soooo inspirational and he made me want to learn so much more about the subject. We sat around discussing the meaning of life and how we were going to change the world and it was just so thrilling, that’s why I ended up studying the subject at university.

TB: Is it still something that actively interests you?

NH: No, not at all, now. I hated university, so I became very disillusioned with the subject. Cambridge was a very tense and very competitive environment, and it was just a really horrible experience and I’m glad I’m out.

TB: Cillian, you studied law at UCC. Did you have a similar experience?

CM: Well, I was kind of under pressure to go to college, and Law had only ten hours a week, so..

TB: That’s a reasonable way of picking a subject...

CM: Yeah, and I failed first year very convincingly. I got into the repeats like, but I didn’t care. It didn’t interest me particularly.

TB: Naomie, concerning The Project: It’s being billed by the BBC as a New Labour satire – so it’s back to political science then?

NH: Yeah, but it’s not a satire really, it’s a docudrama, following the 1997 general election and Labour getting into power and so on. It’s about a group of students who get involved in student politics and then go on to develop political careers and then become disillusioned with politics. It’s about what being in a political system does to you.

TB: In the case of The Project, they were willing to re-write for a black character in order to cast you, but do you find that there are a lot of parts closed to you because you’re black?

NH: You don’t get auditioned for parts anyway, they specify whatever. I don’t resent that at all or feel upset or anything like that. As a black person living in Britain, you know, I think Britain’s fantastic, I love England and I love London, and I feel very lucky and privileged to be living there, but I recognise that I am part of a minority and if it’s the majority who are writing scripts, directing and producing, it’s natural that there will be more roles for white people. I am the minority but I feel so grateful because I talk to black people from older generations who tell me that in their time it was so much worse, and how lucky am I to be doing what I’m doing, and to be where I am.

TB: How about you Cillian, has your ethnicity ever been a barrier to you getting a part?

CM: What, is it because I is black?

TB: No, but you’re from Cork! Do you find yourself having to do accents to secure a role?

CM: Well, I did that BBC thing which was a big thing for me to play, I did or I will be doing two other things that aren’t Irish. For 28 Days Later, my character was originally English, but there’s a huge Irish population in London and it’s conceivable that he could be Irish. It shouldn’t matter, really, but in the nature of being an actor, what we do is we put on the coat of another person, and doing accents is what you’re expected to do as an actor.

Initially, I think if you haven’t been tried and tested, people will always go, ‘Right, let’s be safe, let’s cast an English person, let’s cast an American person, because we’re not going to have that problem (the accent)’ but I think when they see that you’ve hopefully made an impression, they go ‘Right, I want him cause he’s right for this part’, not cause of your extraction or whatever.