Off the back of his first Oscar win, all eyes were on Cillian Murphy. What would the newly crowned Best Actor take on next?
After playing J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s Best Picture-winning feature, Murphy turned his attention to an old collaborator, Tim Mielants, who had directed the star previously in episodes of Peaky Blinders.
He appeared in his film Small Things Like These, set in 1985, where Murphy starred as Bill Furlong, a father who discovers disturbing secrets kept by the local convent and sets out to uncover the truth.
A world away from the close-to-billion-dollar box office of Oppenheimer, Small Things Like These took home a respectable $14.4 million from its $3 million budget, a feat likely credited to Murphy’s star power.
Deciding to stay in the orbit of Mielants, Murphy’s latest flick, Steve, trades convents for classrooms, where he plays the titular frustrated headteacher, who is desperately battling for the survival of his college, while grappling with his mental health.
“Cillian had just come off this huge success, winning his Oscar for this massive film,” Tracey Ullman says as we sit across from one another at London’s Ham Yard Hotel, alongside her co-stars Jay Lycurgo and Little Simz. “I just admire [Cillian] so much for getting us all together. He’s such a great team player. Being in this ensemble and wanting to do something like this. He was just amazing.”
Based on Max Porter’s novella, Shy, which first hit shelves in 2023, Steve switches perspective from the schoolboy played by Jay Lycurgo and rests inside the mind of Cillian Murphy.
Murphy remembers his first encounter with Porter’s book, on a retreat in West Kerry.
“Max read us the novel, and it was one of the first times I think anybody had heard it read out loud,” Murphy says. “It was one of the greatest artistic experiences of my life, actually, hearing this book that the world had not yet encountered being read by the author to his pals.”
However, at that point, it wasn’t on Murphy’s mind that this would someday be a film.
“I didn’t think that Shy could really be filmed,” Porter says, something that anyone who’s flicked through the pages of the novella would understand. It’s as visual as a film in its own respect, but very interior and entirely swept up in the thoughts of Shy.
“I then read the novel when it came out again,” Murphy says. “I just adored it. I adore all his work, but never considered adapting it at that point because of what Max said. It’s very much in Shy’s head.”
So, how did the film come to be?
“I wanted to write a part for Cillian, and we thought Steve was a really interesting way of getting to what the film would be about in a broader social-political context. I’m very interested in that work and the way that private pain, or even personal turmoil and strife, is all the time banging against our responsibilities as parents or carers or teachers or whatever,” says Porter.
“We’ve been a little bit committed,” Porter says of his relationship with Murphy. “We’re sharing work, we’re sharing music, we’re sharing books, we’re sharing ideas about the state the world is in, how badly f****d things are at various different levels. So, we were looking for a thing that we could really get our teeth into, and Steve just popped up.”
Beyond being an excellent commentary on the education system, and the champions holding it up under the crushing weight of threats of removal of funding and support, Steve dives into mental health and how it impacts us all in our work and our lives.
“Some of the best and most brilliant people we know are fracturing, broken, can’t handle it,” Porter says. “Statistically, so many teachers are leaving the profession because of mental health. Suicide is the leading cause of death [in the United Kingdom] in under-30s, and two-thirds of them are boys. This is the world we live in, so let’s write about it. Let’s be utterly uncomplicatedly sincere in our desire to address those people with a loving eye, and celebrate them, and try to reach them on screen.”
While dialogue on mental health has long been a staple of cinema, Steve leans into sincerity, digging beneath the superficiality that can often gloss over these crucial conversations, an element which allowed some of the film’s cast to reflect inward throughout production.
“As an actor, sometimes you don’t really know what your process is going to be,” Lycurgo says. “You just find yourself doing things that are really helpful. I was writing letters to people that I’d lost, and that was so powerful for me.”
“I was dealing with some stuff in my personal life, and going to set was actually my safe haven,” Little Simz says. “Being amongst people that love what they do, that care about a project, that are just nice people as well. Like, genuinely just nice people to be around. It made such a huge difference in my life at the time.”
“I think we all are struggling in different ways,” Mielants tells me. “I think what was important for me is that Steve is not on a pedestal or on a high horse looking down on these kids. These kids feel that he’s not all right, but just by not being 100% all right and being vulnerable, he can get inside them. He will never patronize them. He will never look down on them.”
While managing the chaos of Stanton Wood and his own inner turmoil, Steve is also facing off against a documentary crew capturing the madness on film, an element of the narrative which was attractive to Mielants.
“Around that time, I was going back to videotapes myself, because my father is very sick, and I wanted to know what he was like when he was well. And I lost my brother, and I wanted to see my brother again,” Mielants shares. “I was thinking, ‘What would I do if I got a day [at Stanton Wood]?’ I would go for the beauty and the pain, to find all these boys and to pull something out of them.”
At first, it was storyboards shared between Mielants and Porter, which later became a part of the script when Mielants, who has a background in documentary, encouraged Porter to lean further into this component.
“The script’s very unconventional,” Porter tells me, divulging that Mielants had to go away and think about whether he was the right person to lead this ship. However, Porter knew the Small Things Like These director was the only person for the job.
“We feel only Tim could have figured that out,” he says. “He’s very visual. He’s like a painter. You can see him building scenes in his mind.”
“He tests you,” Jay Lycurgo, who plays Shy, says of his director. “He wants to go into your soul. He’s not trying to see you as an actor. He’s trying to look at you as a person. And that’s the most powerful thing about him.”
The result of that faith is a film that captures all the kinetic energy of Porter’s novella while bringing something even deeper to the story.
Steve doesn’t wait to get to the madness; it launches you right in with it.
The boys of Stanton Wood are running amok, and Steve’s grappling with the reality that, soon, this could all be shut down– something that comes with consequences beyond financial worries about losing a job; you also lose a culture, a family, and trust that has been nurtured over time.
To add to this pressure cooker, a 24-hour clock is placed upon the narrative.
A device not just reserved for the story, but for production, with Cillian Murphy – also a producer on the film – campaigning for the film to be shot chronologically, a practice Murphy borrowed from one of Britain’s greatest filmmakers.
“I had the immense great luck to work with Ken Loach 20 years ago,” Murphy says, “and Ken Loach only shoots in sequence.”
“Given the nature of the shoot, in that we had very few locations, I thought, ‘Why not do this?'” he says. “It will benefit everybody, and it’s like a gift to the crew and the cast when you shoot in sequence because you’re experiencing it as the character experiences it. You’re accumulating the information emotionally and otherwise as the character experiences it.”
Lycurgo echoes Cillian’s sentiments, telling me, “It keeps you in it. It keeps you very present.”
Beyond being a novelty, it’s a beautiful campaign for how films that want to have difficult conversations can benefit from fully allowing their cast and crew to immerse themselves in a story.
While it’s only 93 minutes, Steve packs an emotional punch that lingers beyond the credits, something that can only be credited to how each member of the cast and crew wove a piece of their heart into its fabric.
When asked what he wants audiences to take from the film now that it’s landing on Netflix, Mielants is open, saying, “I can’t tell you. I put my heart and soul into it, and I present this movie now to them, and I hope it’s a starting point for discussion and contemplation. It’s for them now. It’s in their hands now.”
Steve is available to stream on Netflix from October 3, 2025.
