BATMAN BEGINS: CILLIAN MURPHY

His character specializes in spreading fear, but Cillian Murphy really didn't have any fear in playing the Scarecrow in Batman Begins.

"You've just got to be true to yourself, I guess, and rely on whatever instincts you have," says Murphy, perhaps best known from the film 28 Days Later. "And when you're working with people as talented in this movie, you feel quite safe with the decisions."

In the film, Jonathan Crane is an accomplished young psychiatrist and the head of the prisoner population at Gotham's Arkham Asylum mental facility. Crane's specialty is the study of fears and phobias, and he has developed a toxin through which he can tap into and unleash his patients' worst fears, and as his alter-ego, the hideously-masked Scarecrow, he uses terror and paranoia as weapons against them.

"Crane believes the mind controls everything, and he wants to control your mind," producer Charles Roven says.

"Crane has obviously achieved a lot at quite a young age, and he's very arrogant,² says Murphy. "He's not physically imposing, so his way of countering his lack of physicality is through his intelligence and his fear toxin. It's deeply rooted in getting revenge for being maligned when he was younger. He gets satisfaction from seeing people reduced to an almost catatonic state of fear, just as he was as a child."

"We felt that Crane's drive to manipulate people through fear presented a very interesting parallel to the journey that Bruce Wayne embarks on with the Batman persona," says director Christopher Nolan.

This is the first time the Scarecrow has been portrayed in live-action.

"Playing Crane's metamorphosis into Scarecrow was really appealing," says Murphy, who read all of the Batman comics in which Scarecrow appears after he was cast in the role.

Murphy, who next stars with Rachel McAdams in Wes Craven's Red Eye, apparently struck the right nerve.

"He's very creepy," says Katie Holmes, whose Rachel Dawes shares several screens with Crane.

"Cillian's performance as Crane is incredibly creepy and chilling," producer Emma Thomas says. "He has an extraordinary screen presence, and there is something especially unnerving about his eyes when he is playing Crane. I wouldn't want to be alone in a room with that character!"

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