For years, Michael Cyril Creighton hoped one of his small TV parts would evolve into something more. With Only Murders , it finally happened. On a rainy morning in early August, actor Michael Cyril Creighton sat in a dog-friendly cafe on the outskirts of Astoria, Queens.
With him was Sharon, his 7-year-old rescue, who is part Chihuahua, part Jack Russell terrier, with a soupçon of haunted doll. Another dog scampered over to their table. Sharon growled low in her throat and bared her teeth.
“She has a troubled past,” Creighton said, soothing her. “But she’s great.” Creighton – bespectacled, bearded, with a cuddlesome physique – is more reliably sociable.
During a two-hour conversation that began with savoury scones and included a damp walk at a nearby sculpture park, he growled not once – not even when interrupted, frequently, by fans of his work on Only Murders in the Building . In Only Murders , the Hulu series about occasional homicides in a luxury co-op on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Creighton, 45, plays Howard, a librarian and hobbyist yodeller with an impressive sweater game. A gossip and a noodge, keen to be accepted by the building’s amateur detectives, a trio played by Selena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short, Howard is also capable of surprising vulnerability.
So is Creighton, who combines a mordant wit and a clown’s broad instincts with deep feeling..
