Ballet Takes Center Stage in this Music Video

July 10, 2013


Photo of Murphy by Ian Gavan/Getty Images

You probably know Cillian Murphy as the villainous Scarecrow from Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, or as the hero of the insanely scary zombie movie 28 Days Later. But it turns out he’s dabbling in directing these days. In fact, he just finished up his first music video. And it involves…lots of ballet dancers.

Weird as that sounds right off the bat, it turns out it’s even weirder: Murphy admits in this interview that he’s never actually been to the ballet. But when he was asked to make a video for British band MONEY’s song “Hold Me Forever,” ballet dancers, for some reason, immediately came to mind. A Twitter callout resulted in a collaboration with some of the most beautiful members of the English National Ballet, who danced for Murphy’s cameras in London’s historic Old Vic Theatre.

You’d never guess, from the finished product, that Murphy isn’t a longtime ballet fan: He films the dancers beautifully and reverently, seemingly awestruck by their elegance and physicality. We see them going through their daily paces at the barre, but the exercises that we think of as so ordinary are transformed by his outsider’s eye into something extraordinary. Take a look!