Love/Hate star returns in mythical TV drama

“I meet people who ask me, ‘Are you still acting?’ As if after Love/Hate I was like, ‘I’m done’.”
Killian Scott is far from done. The Dublin actor, who shot to fame in the gritty RTE crime drama, is back on our screens this week in a new Netflix series, and he is keen to show people that there’s more to him than playing the gangster Tommy Daly.
Episodes of Love/Hate have been streamed 24 million times on ITVX over the last two years, according to the UK broadcaster — not bad for a show that ended in 2014 after its fifth season.
“I was completely unaware of that,” Scott tells The Sunday Times. “That’s wonderful. It’s great for an Irish show to spread its wings ten years after we ­finished. No matter what myself or others involved have gone on to do, Love/Hate is still primary. For some people it is the only association with us.”
Scott, 39, is starring in KAOS, a new series from Charlie Covell, creator of ­The End of the F***ing World. The series imports Greek gods into a contemporary setting. The concept of powerful beings — including Zeus, king of the gods, who is played by Jeff Goldblum as an insecure megalomaniac — who are involved in manipulating the masses has parallels to populist politics.
Scott is Orpheus, the legendary mortal musician so distraught over the death of his wife, Eurydice, that he goes to the underworld to find her. Orpheus is a rock star in this modern iteration of the myth, and a character Scott was born to play.
A decade ago, the actor left his home in London and moved to Berlin with dreams of becoming a professional ­musician. “I had become obsessed with the guitar. I was, once upon a time, a ­substandard drummer in a band with my best friends, by far the weakest link in that chain. Over time I put music to one side and focused on acting. I came to ­Berlin on a whim. I began an ongoing, endless, eternal attempt at developing music. I would go off and film shows and then come back and sit in my room in Berlin and play guitar.”
Scott, who still lives in Germany, felt an “immediate, easy, natural connection” with Orpheus, a man willing to go to unfathomable depths to rescue Riddy, played by Aurora Perrineau, the love of his life. He recorded a song, written by members of the indie-pop band Bastille, at Abbey Road studios in London, and fulfilled his rock-star ambitions by ­performing in a concert sequence in front of hundreds of extras at a plaza in Seville, Spain, for the first episode of KAOS. “I haven’t been in front of an ­audience that size in my professional career,” he says, calling a “career ­highlight, exhilarating and terrifying”.
Scott enjoys straying out of his comfort zone. Last year he appeared in Dublin in the first professional play of his career, Hangmen, written by Martin McDonagh. “If you had seen me an hour before almost every single performance of Hangmen, I was terrified. You’ve got to quieten those voices and that pressure in order to deliver. I like to chase things that scare me. I think that’s maybe explains a lot of my career.”
It certainly helps to explain a decision he took early in his career. Scott was born Cillian Murphy in Dublin in 1985. His father is Colin Murphy, a magazine writer who scripted work such as The ­Guarantee, a play and film about the 2008 banking crisis. His brother is Eoghan Murphy, the former Fine Gael TD. But his own name, Cillian Murphy, was already taken. “I was doing my first semi-professional play and the director was like, ‘We can’t put your name on the poster. We’ll get sued.’”
So he changed his name to Scott “out of necessity”, adding a K for good ­measure. Scott, he explains, was his great-grandmother’s name. “It maintains a familial connection, because I didn’t like to lose the family name.”
He’s not unusual in this. Nicolas Cage, Natalie Portman and Michael Caine are among the many actors who use stage names. But after 15 years working under a pseudonym, while living and travelling as Cillian Murphy, he still finds the double identity a bit weird.
“One time I arrived at the check-in desk of a low-budget hotel in Dublin. The guy asked me for my name. I said, ‘Cillian Murphy’.
“He laughed and goes, ‘Oh we were wondering if it was going to be the actor but of course, he’d never stay in this hotel’.”
This year, Scott says, he was “sitting in a kebab shop” when he heard an announcement over the radio that the Oscar for best actor had gone to Cillian Murphy. “For a fraction of a ­second, I thought, ‘I need to be ­somewhere. Why didn’t someone tell me?’”
Love/Hate, which began broadcasting in 2010, gave Scott his own provenance. He dropped out of drama school when he was cast in the show. “I can’t properly articulate how exciting Love/Hate was. In the space of a week I went from being in a classroom to being on the set with Tom Vaughan-Lawlor.
“Between shows like Love/Hate and KAOS I’ve been incredibly ­fortunate. Love/Hate blew up out of nowhere. We were in season three before anyone was paying attention. All of us in the cast will tell you stories about how one day we were anonymous, the next day random guys would come up asking, ‘Holy shit, are you Killian Scott?’”
His career had taken off. In 2017, he landed his first big lead in Damnation, an American period drama that Netflix co-produced. He acted with Liam Neeson in the 2018 film The ­Commuter, and had another lead role in the 2019 TV drama Dublin Murders. The next year he was cast in an AMC show, but he couldn’t make it to the because of Covid restrictions, and work dried up for almost four years.
Scott’s casting in last year’s Secret Invasion, a miniseries for Disney+ set in the Marvel ­Cinematic Universe, revived his passion for his craft.
“When we went to LA to do the premiere for Secret ­Invasion, I went into my hotel room beside where the ­premiere was taking place, looked out the window and saw a section of Sunset Boulevard was closed off. In my dumb head, I thought ‘I wonder what that’s for?’ Then I realised.
“As a kid I had always imagined how cool would it be to have moments like the stereotypical Hollywood premiere. I made a point to enjoy that moment. I didn’t have a particularly influential part in Secret Invasion but I still thought, ‘This is a really cool thing to do’.”
The momentum that started with Love/Hate continues in KAOS, in which he is a central character. It inspired him to do something with music. “I’ve been working towards finally trying to get something recorded and released,” he says, coyly.
There seems to be a wonderful serendipity, guided by the gods, in the way everything has worked out for the artist formerly known as Cillian Murphy. “As far as my career is concerned,” he says, “I wouldn’t have changed a single beat of it.”