In a Galway restaurant on a wet and windy night, Cillian Murphy shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “They’re not something you can control,” he says. “I hope . . . Well, I suppose every actor would hope this . . . I don’t think I’m limited in any way. I find this very uncomfortable, talking about this.”

The subject in question is Murphy’s looks.

“I think there are actors who are transformative and actors who aren’t. There are actors who can play the leading role, the love interest, but they can also play the loser in the ditch. I think Johnny Depp can do it magnificently.

“There’s obviously an industry built around the body beautiful that sells magazines and films. There are certain people who sell magazines and people who don’t. I am firmly rooted in the latter. I don’t think anybody would ever sell a magazine on the back of my name.”

But what of his burgeoning female following: is he entirely unaware of it? “That’s bullshit,” he says firmly. “I have never experienced any of that. Genuinely.”

He has come from rehearsals of Druid’s new production of The Playboy of the Western World. Garry Hynes, the Druid director, having made her name with the company’s production of J M Synge’s classic 25 years ago, is returning in his centenary year to the story of a man made mighty by the power of a lie.

In Druid’s original Playboy, Mick Lally was a swarthy Christy Mahon, defining the role for a generation. Hynes’s choice of Murphy — she had her eye on him for the part five years ago, when he was just 22 — has the potential to define Mahon for another generation.

The story of a boy who grows to manhood in the reflected glow of a community’s fickle admiration, it also has obvious potential as a convenient but misleading metaphor for Murphy’s career, something of which he is not unaware. “He’s the man who believed his own myth,” says Murphy. For some self-mythologising clearly works; it’s something, however, from which Murphy instinctively shrinks.

“The actors I like are the ones I know nothing about,” He says. “Edward Norton. Joaquin Phoenix. I don’t know who he is going out with, I don’t care, I’ve never seen him on chat shows. I just think he is a brilliant f****** actor.

“Some celebrities live their lives completely in the papers. I abhor all that stuff. For that to be sustained it has to be fed. I haven’t created any controversy, I don’t sleep around, I don’t go and fall down drunk.”

It is perhaps just as well. On the cusp of international stardom, Murphy is on a trajectory to becoming a staple of the celebrity publishing industry.

Having appeared in one successful feature film after another since dropping out of University College Cork — his work includes Disco Pigs, 28 Days Later, Intermission, Cold Mountain and Girl with a Pearl Earring — he is set to move to the next level in Hollywood with a villain’s role in the next Batman film. He tried out for the role of Batman, which eventually was awarded to Christian Bale.

“I never thought I was right for that actual role,” he says. “I mean, they would have had to shoot it all in perspective, with dwarves playing all the villains. Obviously whatever I did made an impression on (director) Christopher Nolan.”