Producer Judith Dimant said she was saved the headache of casting after playwright Enda Walsh invited “my friend Cillian” to an audition for Grief is the Thing with Feathers.
Dimant launched her own production company with the play after getting the rights from the publisher. She sent the original novel to Walsh, who adapted and directed it.
She said: “We decided to do a workshop on it and he said, ‘I’ll bring my friend Cillian’. If you have a director like Enda, when he read it he thought, ‘I know this is Cillian Murphy’. It was simple like that.”
Dimant said the story, which she describes as “somewhere between” a novel and a poem, resonated with the leading man and added: “Cillian engaged with the material so quickly.
“The piece got under his skin and he could relate to the character, they were a similar age, he’s got children. It felt right.
“I think he’s very particular about the theatre work he does and he just felt this was very special.”
April's best theatre shows - in pictures
