Breakfast On Pluto

Bryan Ferry belongs to that select breed of musicians capable of turning the very concept of elegance into a total aesthetic, one that has proven enormously influential on the generations that followed. From Roxy Music to his solo career, the entire artistic journey of pop's handsome dark stranger has been a dizzying slalom through genres (between rock 'n' roll and r'n'b, dance and soul, glam and country, folk and blues, new wave and jazz) that only a virtuoso's crystalline class could tame, making it all look far too easy.

His modern-dandy approach and his aplomb as a languid, romantic crooner made him a universal glamour icon. It's easy, then, to put two and two together and picture him perfectly at ease on a film set too. Yet, to every cinematic overture that surely reached his ears, the man in the white tuxedo and bow tie has always said no. Which makes his one truly significant foray onto the big screen stand out all the more: a 2005 cameo in "Breakfast On Pluto".

Neil Jordan's film, adapted from Patrick McCabe's novel of the same name, tells the story of Patrick "Kitten" Brady, a transgender woman played by a young Cillian Murphy, remarkable both for his physical transformation and emotional nuance. The daughter of a priest and a young maid, abandoned at birth, Kitten grows up chasing a stubborn desire: to be loved, to find a possible place in the world, to become the person she feels she is. Her journey – from conservative Ireland to the boiling London of the Sixties and Seventies – passes through the rise of the IRA, the clashes of the Troubles, Catholic repression, the music scene of the era, and a Europe changing shape before her eyes. With a delicate, affectionate touch, the director of "The Crying Game" builds a visionary film, a psychedelic and pop cauldron that, despite its seeming lightness, tackles harsh themes: the effect of violence on innocence, the search for identity, otherness as an existential condition.

Ferry's deeply self-mocking cameo materializes in a scene with a tragicomic edge. The leader of Roxy Music appears as Mr. Silky String, a mustachioed, shady "client" of Kitten's, who gets into her car only to try to strangle her with a silk cord, until his victim manages to break free by spraying a bottle of perfume in his face. The consummate impeccable dandy thus slips into the role of a grotesque, unsettling villain, driven by murderous impulses.

"I needed an English character for a small part," Jordan explained. "I could have gone to a famous actor, since Ralph Fiennes had agreed to appear in 'Triplo gioco' in a genuinely marginal role. But since the film is centered on music, and I myself was listening to a huge amount of music at the time, I thought of Bryan. I didn't know him, but I remembered that back then he seemed to be acting whenever he performed, and he had this really elegant look. Even though he'd never acted before, he was perfect for that role. We shot the scene in a single afternoon."

In "Breakfast On Pluto", alongside Murphy and an incredibly rich cast (Stephen Rea, Ian Hart, Brendan Gleeson, Liam Neeson), there's another presence drawn from the world of music: Gavin Friday, leader of Virgin Prunes, who plays Billy Hatchett, an ambiguous, magnetic figure, in the film. Friday isn't just a rock cameo grafted on for effect: he's a direct reference to the novel's imagery. Pat McCabe, in fact, dedicated the book to him, acknowledging that he had been deeply influenced by him in shaping the character of Kitten. "Gavin is an old friend," McCabe explained, "and his album 'Shag Tobacco' had a huge influence on the book (so much so that in the novel the protagonist goes by Pussy rather than Kitten, echoing 'Mr. Pussy', a track from that record, ed.). I love those aspects of Dublin that he invented: the burlesque, the music halls, that nightlife. I used to play with him once, and I felt like he was constantly feeding me wild new ideas. Gavin is a natural Billy Hatchett, a true band frontman." And Friday's performance would turn out to be one of the film's most successful surprises.

After that singular parenthesis, Ferry would practically never return to the big screen, save for a few brief appearances in short films. His last real foray into a major audiovisual production is a cameo as himself in an episode of "Babylon Berlin", the German blockbuster series set in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, amid economic crisis, political ferment, and a teeming cultural underworld. In the series, built as an ambitious historical noir, Ferry also lends his music in orchestral form, contributing to an evocative, highly refined soundtrack that constantly plays between modernity and 1930s atmosphere.

So, in his path as a total artist, cinema remains for Ferry a rare, peripheral space. But that's precisely why his grotesque Mr. Silky String remains, in his own way, unforgettable.

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09/03/2026