In the decade since he was "discovered" by Joel Schumaker, Colin Farrell has worked with many of Hollywood's biggest directors, earned a place among the top celebrity bad boys of all time, become a father, and, lately, found his mellower side. It's been one hell of a ride, he tells
DONALD CLARKE
IN NEIL JORDAN’S upcoming
Ondine,
our own Colin Farrell – currently looking bronzed and healthy beneath a hectare of tattoos – plays Syraceuse, a Cork fisherman who finds an exotically accented young woman curled in his net. Later, it begins to look as if she might be a class of Celtic mermaid. Syraceuse, formerly a heavy boozer, now on the Tizer, has reformed his ways, in part because he now has to care for a child with special needs.
Interviews with movie stars involve a bit of cautious finessing: we’ll certainly talk about the new film, but both interviewer and actor know that the private life will also have to be addressed. By taking the role in
Ondine
, however, Farrell almost seems to be inviting us to nudge our way into his living room.
Now off the drink, following a decade of festivities, Farrell himself has a child with special needs. Young James Padraig – whose mother, like the equivalent character in Ondine, is separated from dad – has a rare, serious neuro-genetic disorder.
“I was going to say that the similarities between Syraceuse and me were superficial, but, you know, they’re not,” he says. “But the script is so good, it allowed me the option of objectivity. I have been off the sauce for five years. He’s been off for two. He has a daughter who has her problems. Thank God, my son is in great shape. There’s nothing terminal. But certainly the trials faced are similar.”
Of course, Farrell is never ever hard to talk to. Despite being the target of outrageous amounts of ludicrous gossip, he will not evade hard questions in interviews or blub about supposed invasions of privacy. Indeed, he is, perhaps, a little too open. I remember, at the premiere of one rather dodgy film (you can easily work out which), watching him being dangerously honest about the picture’s underwhelming dialogue. “I did it to work with Al Pacino,” he quipped to a packed cinema. “I mean the script’s not going to win any Oscars. Is it?”
“Did I? That was a bit of honesty then,” he laughs. “If I am asked questions now, I am a bit more wary of the weight of words. I am aware of the significance of putting opinions and ideas out there. I understand the effect that words can have. A while ago, I read some things that I had said about ex-girlfriends. I don’t think I said bad things, but it was disrespectful to talk about that stuff.”
Happily, his (relative) restraint has not dimmed his ability to perk up when a microphone trundles into view. Recall his first-class quip when receiving his Golden Globe for In Bruges. "They must have counted the votes in Florida," he said. He must have had that one prepared.
“No. Not at all,” he laughs. “It was on the fly, man. Maybe that was a moment of inspired genius. Look, that was just a wonderful moment. Is that what we are in he business for? No. But it’s still a lot of fun.”
Anyway, all this is a long-winded way of confirming that our biggest movie star generally comes across as a darn good egg. Dredge through his past and you will, of course, encounter the odd spate of falling-over-while-shouting anecdotes, but Farrell has always – as kindergarten teachers have it – played well with others.
It's a little over a decade since Colin Farrell, now 33, first nudged his head over the parapet. Raised in Castleknock, the son of a former Shamrock Rovers footballer, he attended Dublin's Gaiety School of Acting before securing roles in the TV movie Falling for a Dancerand the TV series Ballykissangel. Shooting Ondineon the Beara Peninsula in Co Cork brought back many memories.
“I’ve always loved that part of the world. Twelve years ago, we shot Falling for a Dancer there. That’s where it all started. Every night, after shooting, we’d be in MacCarthy’s Bar with all the crew. That was the genesis of all this.”
When did he first realise he had actually become a proper celebrity? Did he notice the tipping point when it arrived?
“I remember buying a pair of earrings on O’Connell Bridge and somebody asked me for an autograph during the first series of Ballykissangel. I nearly shit myself I was so excited. Everything was a bouncing board. Falling for a Dancer was a big break. Ballykissangel was another big break. Everything was a step. The most violent lift up was Tigerland, my first American film. Things really changed after that.”
Joel Schumacher, the lovely, indiscrete director of that Vietnam film, likes to think that he “discovered” Colin. But we already knew who he was.
“I love Joel. He kind of did discover me, though. He made the international discovery. But I wouldn’t have got in the room without the work I’d already done.”
You could argue that Farrell has been in relatively few box-office smashes, but, from the moment he arrived in Hollywood, he acquired the aura of a proper movie star. The traditional LA morality tale has the young ingénue stepping off the airplane and straight into a powder-fuelled Babylon. Is that how Farrell recalls his first days making big movies?
“I remember my first time there. I came back and did an interview where I spoke about all the sharks in that town. That was true. The sharks are in Hollywood. But you can find plenty of decent neighbourhoods in LA where ordinary people live. Within the Hollywood structure, it is very superficial. But you can find superficial people anywhere. You can find it here in Dublin. I judged LA harshly at first.”
Farrell, briefly married to one Amelia Warner in 2001, now lives in LA with Alicja Bachleda, his co-star in Ondine, and their four-month-old son. As he tells it, they keep as far from the fleshpots as possible.
“I have built myself a home there now. I don’t mean literally. I’m not good with a hammer,” he says. “I have made a home and live a very simple life there. I don’t feel myself part of the Hollywood infrastructure. I will go out when awards season comes along. But, apart from that, we live a very quiet life.”
What does he miss about home?
“I come back about three times a year,” he says. “The more I go away and come back, the more I fall in love with the land itself. You come back and so much has changed, but there’s always an essential sameness that reminds me of my youth.”
It must be difficult socialising in LA now that he doesn’t drink. Then again, every second person in Hollywood – even if only a few sweet sherries have been consumed – likes to think of himself or herself as a recovering alcoholic. Farrell gave up all stimulants in 2005 following a spell in rehabilitation after developing various interlocking dependencies.
“It’s not so hard in LA. The hardest thing about being a non-drinker is that I have 10 years of good memories of piss-ups in Dublin. I grew up, like most of us, drinking cans. They were great times. You come back to Dublin and you reconnect with the nostalgia of it all.”
Yet the past does tail him still. At this year’s Golden Globes, Ricky Gervais introduced Farrell with the following, pretty decent gag: “One stereotype I hate is that all Irishmen are just drunk, swearing hellraisers. Please welcome Colin Farrell.” Certain (groan) Irish-American websites reported that Farrell looked less than happy. But I felt he had taken the joke quite well.
“Ha, Ha! Yeah, I thought so. I haven’t had a drink in five years,” he says. “But I still have a lot of shit to take before that image goes away. That’s going to follow me. I didn’t mind that dig at all. I was told that he wanted to introduce me and to be honest, I thought it could have been a lot worse. I thought it was really endearing. It was lovely.”
Over the last few years, Farrell does, indeed, seem to have achieved a degree of welcome stability. Though those smash hits remain elusive, he has appeared in an impressive series of high-quality films. For Terrence Malick, he made the rather wonderful The New World. He worked with Woody Allen on Cassandra’s Dream. Michael Mann directed him in the fascinating (if weird) Miami Vice. That’s an impressive line-up of juicy directors. Then there was Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges which, though only modestly successful on release, has now built up a genuinely fanatical cult following.
One measure of how Farrell has changed could be – this only strikes me when I listen back to the tape – that, as well as ditching the drinking, he seems (in interviews, at least) to have given up his famous Olympic-level swearing. Mellowness flows from him.
Mind you, he is still under pressure. The internet continues to hum with largely invented stories concerning his outrageous antics.
“I’ve managed to stop Googling myself,” he says. “I did it for a while, but I have stopped. I used to get very angry about people writing this stuff, but now I feel sorry for them that their lives are so empty they need to gossip about my life.”
A number of exciting film projects are currently nudging over the horizon. In Peter Weir's The Way Back, he stars as one member of a group of soldiers who escape from a Russian gulag. He appears opposite Keira Knightley in a thriller entitled London Boulevard. And then there is Brendan Gleeson's indecently exciting adaption of At Swim Two Birds. There is talk of Gabriel Byrne, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Cillian Murphy and Gleeson himself all co-starring. Phew!
“You’d be terrified to say it will definitely happen,” he says. “It’s very hard for films that don’t have special effects and have a literary core. Few films have more of a literary core than this. We tried to get it made in March, but the money wasn’t there. So, we’re hoping to get it together in the summer.”
Life seems to be coming together for old Colin. He lives reasonably close to Kim Bordenave, James’s mother, and gets to see his son very frequently. Now, he finds himself the father of two children. It’s a sentimental question, but does fatherhood change a chap?
“I’m sure it does, but I don’t know how exactly. I suppose the heart expands accordingly. When I was about to be a father the second time I got this weird dose of fear that I would love one less than the other. But, of course that was ridiculous. I think the heart has a capacity to absorb an infinite amount of love.”
My word, he does sound mellow. I’m happy for him. But I do still miss the swearing a bit.
Ondineopens next week
