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Cillian Murphy may have clinched the Oscar for best actor thanks to Oppenheimer in 2024, but it didn’t stop him from taking a ‘completely different’ approach to his preparation for the film he shot after that surreal awards season – Netflix’s new drama, Steve.
He plays the titular character, a harried but deeply committed headteacher of a last-chance school for boys with behavioural difficulties.
It’s inspired by Max Porter’s best-selling novella Shy, which Porter matter-of-factly tells me is ‘unfilmable’ as is, because it’s based in the head of troubled music-lover Shy (played in the film with beautiful rawness by Jay Lycurgo).
‘I just immediately binned any idea of a novel to screen adaptation,’ he says, when I sit down with him and Murphy ahead of Steve’s release.
He instead brings headteacher Steve – only briefly mentioned in the book – to the forefront and ‘built a person’ to be played by Murphy, a previous collaborator on projects including the stage adaptation of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Porter’s debut novella.
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‘I was trying to establish a kind of layered complexity, because he’s very good at his job, but he’s also breaking. He’s very funny and good with the boys, but he’s also in a moment of professional crisis,’ Porter says of the newly-expanded character.
Why Cillian Murphy chose to change his Oscar-winning approach to acting for Steve
Working on his first screenplay was a lot easier knowing he was creating something for Murphy – ‘writing dialogue for someone whose voice I could hear in my head, and whose character and mannerisms I knew would be deployed’.
‘It was like my palette was already quite full of stuff, and it was then just a question of building him in relation to everyone else,’ Porter adds. ‘So for a novelist, having a crack at screenwriting [it was] an absolute joy.’
He turns to Murphy with glee: ‘I rang you, didn’t I, and said, “I think I’m doing it! I think it’s coming!”’
Their past work together is also what changed everything for Murphy.
‘I tried to take a completely different approach to the whole process for this one, because generally I lock myself away for a long time, I research and read like a mad thing, and you’re developing an accent and a physicality. I love it, and I really go deep into it, and it’s very, very private – I don’t talk to people – and then, bit by bit, I begin to share it with the director,’ he explains, shedding light on his usual process with the likes of past directors Christopher Nolan and Danny Boyle, who gave him his big breakthrough film in 28 Days Later.
‘But with this one, because of all of what Max just said, I thought I’m just going to turn up and be completely available and completely responsive to what’s happening. And because we shot chronologically, and because I was raised by teachers, and because I know Max so well, and knew the book so well, I felt the best way to prepare for this is just to be completely present in every moment and try and absorb what’s happening to the character as it’s happening.’
Steve’s every day at school is very unpredictable due to the chaos of the boys he works with, as well as the strain they’re under – and it was even a filming technique deployed by director Tim Mielants (Small Things Like These).
‘Even with the camera work – the operator would be operating handheld – and sometimes Tim wouldn’t tell him where we’d go. So everyone’s trying to catch up, and Steve’s constantly trying to catch up. Everyone’s behind a little bit, emotionally, schedule-wise, funding wise,’ Murphy shares.
This technique really adds to the film’s frantic energy as the school fights for survival and its teachers – who also include Tracey Ullman’s no-nonsense deputy Amanda and Simbi Ajikawo’s (a.k.a. Little Simz) fresh-faced Shola – fight to contain and inspire their students, picked out after auditioning more than 3,000 boys.
Porter and Murphy also laugh over how the mayhem impacted Murphy between scenes too, as a producer on the film.
I’m just going to turn up and be completely available and responsive to what’s happening
‘Everyone wanted something from him, even when Tim called cut, it’s like, can I grab you for a minute?’ Porter recalls, before putting on a whining voice to send himself up: ‘“Cillian, can you talk to me? I’m feeling a bit sensitive.” He was hunted through the school!’
‘It was like jumping out of a helicopter. And I really enjoyed it,’ Murphy chimes in with a smile, but is unable to stop himself adding after a pause: ‘… While I hated it.’
We meet just after another Netflix project, Adolescence, has swept the Emmys having also provoked a lot of discussion about the challenges teachers face in 2025. Steve is set in 1996, but the issues feel just as relevant with its examination of education outside the mainstream system.
The ‘mind-blowing’ response to Steve so far
While Murphy’s former teacher parents are yet to see Steve, he says he’s really looking forward to talking to them about it afterwards ‘because I really did not appreciate what they did’ as a child, taking it for granted while they were in the thick of their careers.
But they are already starting to receive feedback from people who experience the system they’re portraying, with Murphy describing some of their responses as ‘very profoundly affecting’.
‘It’s kicking off,’ adds Porter. ‘These last couple of weeks, we’re starting to get responses from real people – not saying movie critics aren’t real people – but recovering addicts, teachers, foster carers, even people whose children have not fitted into school and needed either special educational needs or a different school. The responses are mind-blowing and mean the world to us.’
Porter says the team focused on trying to make Steve without ‘any level of artificiality or ideological gimmick – you’re making it purely to try and get at it – and when people watch it, they know that that work has been done.’
He’s clearly immensely proud of the work that he, Murphy and the team have done – their care over the project is evident in their engagement in the interview, especially Murphy who has been meme-ified before for appearing to zone out (he is not a star to seek the limelight and in fact hasn’t done any acting at all this year).
‘This film has a sort of residual resonance that people will feel quite a long time after they’ve watched it,’ Porter suggests. ‘And a lot of people are saying they just needed an hour after they’ve seen it to process it.’
In terms of the film’s reception so far, he sees it as ‘a collaboration’ with the audience – ‘you need to go away and do some of the thinking and decide for yourself what happens to these characters and what it is they’ve been up to’. This is certainly true of Steve’s rather ambiguous ending.
Murphy is also taking a cautiously optimistic longer view on Steve and its impact.
‘I always judge a piece of art by its afterlife, how long it hangs around in your psyche and your dreams: if you read a book and you’re still thinking about it months later, or you watch a film and you just can’t get that atmosphere out of your head.’
It sounds like Steve could be exactly that type of film, something which Netflix will be hoping for come awards season, given that it has the awards qualifying two-week cinema run.
‘That’s the ultimate for me, that’s when something has hit, is that it has an afterlife.’
Steve is out in select UK cinemas from today and streams exclusively on Netflix from October 3.
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