Colin Farrell's public image is of a hard-drinking, cursing, womanising bad boy, but Michael Dwyer finds him refreshingly candid.
What you see is what you get when it comes to Colin Farrell. Three years ago, he was known at home for his roles in the television series Ballykissangel and Falling for a Dancer, and was completely unknown abroad. His subsequent rise through the Hollywood ranks has been meteoric: he has worked with Steven Spielberg, Joel Schumacher, Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis and Al Pacino, and his salary has soared to $8 million a film. All before he turns 27 at the end of this month.
Distinctly aware of how lucky he has been, he wears his success lightly, and there has been no discernible change in him. The only difference is that he now lives his life in the full glare of the international media, which seize upon his frankness about his smoking and drinking and all the many women with whom he may or may not been involved, and the expletive-littered language with which he expresses himself. When he turned up with Britney Spears on his arm at the recent Hollywood première of The Recruit, the pictures were splashed across newspapers and magazines around the world. When Vanity Fair put him on the cover, it assigned an American journalist to spend a few days with him in Dublin, and the writer was open-mouthed in his astonishment, as were many who read the article.
"I was just on the piss for three days," Farrell says with characteristic candour. "Everything that's in the article is something I actually said. It's just me, or a side of me. The journalist was shocked big time. He did say that I nearly got into a fight with a barman in Renard's, and that wasn't true. We were just having a bit of banter, and he took it seriously.
"Whoever knows me knows that I was being myself in that interview, and most people just thought it was funny. There were letters from Irish-Americans saying it was a disgrace that an Irishman would behave like that - probably from people whose great- grandfather second removed came from Galway or Mayo over 100 years ago."
Farrell, who is from Castleknock in Dublin, was plucked from relative obscurity when Joel Schumacher chose him for the starring role in Tigerland, a tight, gritty drama set in a Louisiana boot camp in 1971 as a platoon of young men, conscripts and volunteers, are put through a gruelling training regime before being shipped off to Vietnam.
"Everything happened so fast," Farrell says. "So much of it has to do with being in the right place at the right time. Being asked to meet Joel Schumacher was just an unbelievable slice of luck. Isn't it mad the way things happen? Just because one person like Joel thinks you're ready to do his film.
"Suddenly so many people are interested in you. I trust Joel so much. He's a good friend and he's been so good to me. With Joel, you can allow yourself to fail. I would try anything for him, and I would feel safe and secure."
He was reunited with Schumacher for Phone Booth, in which Farrell edgily plays a cocky, manipulative Manhattan publicist who is using a payphone to call the aspirant actress he is attempting to seduce, when the phone rings and on the line is a threatening voice (Kiefer Sutherland) warning him he will be killed if he hangs up.
Schumacher shot Phone Booth in just 12 days. "It was cool," says Farrell. "As Michael Caine said: 'Pay me for the waiting around and the acting's for free.' If that were the case with Phone Booth, I wouldn't have been paid anything. There was so little waiting around. The cameraman, Matty Libatique, who also shot Tigerland and Requiem for a Dream, is so fast - he had three cameras going at the same time and was using a lot of natural light. There was no time to over-think it, or for long, meaningful pauses. I was reacting all the time to what was going on."
When I note that the film doesn't present a very flattering picture of publicists, he replies: "I've met fuckers working in Burger King who have bigger egos than the character I play in the film. You meet bastards in every walk of life, in every job in the world. Making the character a publicist was a very good idea because in a very short space you get to show his potential for being an asshole every day."
Because he was centre-screen for every day of the tight shoot, Farrell found the film particularly demanding: "It was tough going all the way and I was fairly fucked by the end of it, but I was also falling in love during it, which gave me the energy to keep going. Whatever that gave me, it gave me a lot. It was the first time I ever had a muse."
His muse was British actress Amelia Warner. "I had met her a week before we started shooting the film," he says. "She moved into the hotel room with me four days after I met her. I woke up after spending our third night together and went to work for the first day on the film. She was there every night when I came home and we would go out together. We were falling in love big time. It was cool to be going through that."
They were married in July 2001, but had broken up before the end of the year. "Things change," he says. "I would do it all over again. I'd be mad to, but I would in a second. It was a fairly punchy experience."
When Schumacher was in Dublin last year to direct Veronica Guerin, which stars Cate Blanchett as the murdered Sunday Independent journalist, he called on Farrell to play a cameo in the movie. "I come up and I flirt with Cate Blanchett for 15 seconds and then I walk off," Farrell says. "I'm standing outside a barbershop watching a Manchester United game on television inside and she comes by and asks what's the score.
"She starts reeling off all these facts about Cantona, so I ask her if she wants to go for a pint and watch the game in a pub. She says 'no, thanks' and walks off, and that's the end of the scene. It was good fun. It was great to see Joel Schumacher working in Dublin - just three years after he gave me my chance and started off all this madness."
Since then, Farrell greatly enjoyed working in Dublin again and playing his first substantial role in an Irish movie, co-starring with Cillian Murphy and Colm Meaney in Intermission, an urban love story which marks the feature film débuts of writer Mark O'Rowe and director John Crowley.
"It's a fucking brilliant script," Farrell says. "It's about love and the pursuit of love, starting off in all the wrong places. It's about violence and its repercussions. It's so fucking funny, sometimes tragically so and sometimes gloriously uplifting. It just covers every base. It's so smart. I can't say I was surprised because I had seen Mark O'Rowe's play, Howie the Rookie. It goes for the Irish thing, it doesn't sit on the fence. But it's not Irish in any Paddy kind of way. This is real Dublin street storytelling. It was shot all around Dublin. If we were shooting a scene in a café, it would be done in a real café. If we were doing a scene in a living room, we would use a real house. It was great to get back to low-budget guerrilla film-making."
Because of his Hollywood commitments, the producers arranged the schedule so that all of Farrell's scenes could be shot over the course of one intense week. "I play a small-time criminal who's the biggest scumbag in the whole thing," he says. "I really enjoyed doing a few scenes with Colm Meaney and finally getting to work with Cillian Murphy. John Crowley was so specific and so good at communicating exactly what he wanted. He knew the film inside out. I think it's going to do so well, which would be great for an Irish production."
Farrell candidly admits that his first US movies - Tigerland, American Outlaws, Hart's War - were failures at the box office before Spielberg decided to cast him opposite Tom Cruise in Minority Report. "Every film I made before that had tanked. Nobody had seen anything I had been in," he says.
Since then, he has scored two US box office number ones within three weeks of each other with The Recruit, in which he comfortably holds his own against Al Pacino, and Daredevil, the comic strip adaptation in which he plays the villain, Bullseye. "I didn't know the comic series, but I know it now," he says.
"Bullseye was fun to play. He's a bit like the Joker, the Jack Nicholson character in Batman. He laughs at his own jokes, he enjoys himself far too much. I had a funny-looking costume and a big bullseye on my head."
In The Recruit, Farrell plays a young man drawn into the CIA by a mentor figure played by Pacino. Did he find it intimidating? "Kind of," he says. "Not because of anything he said or did, but because you have a relationship with someone like him before you ever meet him. You've seen him in so many movies and he has done such fine work.
"The first day I shot with him, the first scene was one where he slams a door in my face and really cuts me down to size. I didn't even need to act. But I got over any nervousness with him very quickly. I got very fond of him very fast. We had good chats. I met some of his family, and I realised he's just flesh and blood like any other man. He is a really good man."
Having been paid $5 million for The Recruit, Farrell received $8 million to co-star with Samuel L. Jackson in the recently shot Los Angeles police thriller, S.W.A.T. He is set to star as Alexander the Great in Oliver Stone's imminent epic, Alexander, and is also likely to feature in the low-budget A Home at the End of the World, adapted from the novel by Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours.
It would be an understatement to say that the start of the 21st century has been a whirlwind for Colin Farrell. "It's been a total rollercoaster," he says. "But I don't believe my life has changed that much. I don't feel different. It's all been mad, like a circus. But it's mostly work."
It's work that now pays him $8 million a movie. "God forgive me, I probably don't know how lucky I am, but I don't even think about that very much. It's nice to know that I have it there, that I can look after my family. That's it."
Phone Booth will be shown at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival tonight at 6.35 p.m. in the Screen cinema, and goes on release from April 11th. Colin Farrell will participate in a public interview following the festival's screening of The Recruit tomorrow at 6 p.m. in the Screen. The film will be released here on March 28th.