It's three out of three for Cillian Murphy - a hat-trick of must-see performances in a row. First, there was his Oscar-winning turn in 2023's Oppenheimer, then last year's Small Things Like These, and now Steve, another character that gives Murphy the opportunity to indulge his love of playing people under pressure.
Review: Cillian Murphy's Netflix school drama Steve earns its gold star
Adapted by author Max Porter from his novella Shy, Steve follows the head teacher at a last-chance school for young offenders in the south of England. The job has swallowed him whole, and as Steve tries to do the best by everyone over the course of 24 hours, the troubles in his own mind intensify. It's a powerful study of mental health in all its complexity and masculinity in all its hues, with Murphy's portrayal tender and troubling in equal measure.
As with Small Things Like These and Oppenheimer, the Cork actor is among friends. He previously worked with author Porter on the stage adaptation of Porter's book Grief is the Thing with Feathers and the short film All of this Unreal Time. Steve also reunites Murphy with Small Things Like These and Peaky Blinders director Tim Mielants and Small Things Like These co-star Emily Watson.
It's a film with shocks and surprises for lovers of Porter's inside-the-mind novella and newcomers alike - the first of which arrives in the opening minute. In Porter's Shy, which focuses on the young student of the same name, Steve is only mentioned briefly. Here, he's the lead character from the off - and he's Irish.
"We kind of backed ourselves into a corner with that one!" laughs Murphy when asked whose idea it was to have Steve as Irish.
"When we did the adaptation of Grief is the Thing with Feathers for the stage, which Enda [Walsh] adapted, we all decided that it would be again smarter just to not have him be English. You take away one other kind of 'veil' [from the performance], you know? You just take it away. And the amount of Irish teachers living in the UK and social workers and carers, it's insane."
Indeed, Steve plays like a thank-you letter to great teachers' ability to change lives. Murphy is from a family of teachers, but he says that wasn't at the forefront of his mind when he decided to make Steve his next film.
"That actually honestly came later," he recalls.
"The first impulse was to make more work with Max. We had just made Small Things Like These, and I really wanted to work with Tim (Mielants, Small Things Like These director) again. It was Max's idea. We had actually talked about the idea of somebody who was a teacher or somebody in care [for a film]. Max had the idea to go back to Shy, which I was very, very familiar with as a novel, but we both agreed [it] was unadaptable. But then Max had the brilliant idea to just adapt the world of the novel rather than the novel absolutely."
"But then, as I began to think back on my own childhood and adolescence, the fact that both my parents worked in education, and my grandfather was a teacher, and all my aunties and uncles, I began to just realise how much part of my upbringing it was," Murphy continues.
"Then, [I] inevitably started thinking about being in school and what you were like in school and how the good teachers had such a good impact and the other ones not so much! So, then it all began to come back to me. Like the way stuff hits you in middle life, where you begin to reappraise everything and your respect for your parents just deepens and deepens and deepens. So, it was kind of nice timing. And also, my kids were of an age where they were kind of beginning to leave school. It was all sort of a nice melting pot of coincidence and good timing."
And learning on the job. Steve is the second offering from Murphy's company Big Things Films, and he's relishing his other new role - as a film producer.
"Alan Moloney is my producing partner and he's a vastly experienced producer with an amazing insight into how you can build, finance, and shoot a film," he explains. "So, I think combined with him, I'm learning a great deal.
"There's many, many things about it that I really, really enjoy, especially as well being in the post-production, which you're kind of locked out of as an actor! Rightfully so - you don't want actors sitting around every part of it! But I love the mechanical nature of putting a film together. I love the grading process. I adore the scoring part of it. I adore the mixing. That kind of... the magic dust that happens when you're in post-production with a film. So, I absolutely love the whole process."
That process begins with the personal relationships, and Steve shows that Murphy's knack for choosing the right jobs as an actor is now matched by his instinct for picking the right collaborators as a producer.
"What I enjoy most about it is being able to put people together and seeing how work can come from it, or seeing how these people bounce off each other," he enthuses.
"Putting Max in a room with Tim Mielants (Steve director) was just one of the great days of my career, because I could see it simmering and then they just took off. Things like that are very satisfying to me - to be able to work with Eileen Walsh, for example, on Small Things Like These, to be able to work with Emily Watson on Small Things Like These and then work with her again on Steve."
"The ambition is to make good work," he concludes. "And if you've got friends that are as gifted as he (Max) is or as gifted as Tim is, why not put them together and see what happens?"
Murphy will be in the best of company again for what's coming next: the Peaky Blinders film The Immortal Man. Four out of four, so.
Steve is in cinemas now. It arrives on Netflix on Friday 3 October.
