`I didn't realise till I was in Los Angeles for a couple of weeks that the guy who's representing me also has Cuba Gooding, Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Shue and Ed Harris on his books. So I'd better get a gig pretty quick!" Colin Farrell is already contemplating the pressures of life in the Hollywood fast lane, although he doesn't really seem too worried about it all.
You may have difficulty placing Farrell now, but remember his name and face, because the 22-year-old from Castleknock is the latest in a lengthening line of young Irish actors being groomed for the showbiz big time, following in the footsteps of the likes of Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Stuart Townsend. It's barely two years since he started studying at the Gaiety School of Acting, but his credits already include starring roles in Falling for a Dancer and Ballykissangel, while he'll also be seen in the upcoming Ordinary DeRO] cent Criminal. He's very happy with the experience of playing troubled young Dubliner Danny in Ballykissangel. "I don't know how many people watch it in this country, although I know it's very popular in England, but I'd like to do it again. It's a great gig with great actors. and you get loads of experience." He still doesn't know if he'll be in the next series, which starts shooting in the spring.
He never really did any acting while he was at school, he says. "I never had the balls to go for it. I was always into football. My Da, Eamonn Farrell, and his brother Tommy, both played for Shamrock Rovers. He used to say some bird would come along and grab me by the short and curlies, and that would be the end of football - then you discover pints and cigarettes and girls and you have to make a decision that you're going to dedicate your life to it or just chill out for a few years and figure out what you're going to do, which is what I did."
After a year in Australia, he enrolled in the Gaiety School of Acting in 1996, and at the end of his first year was cast as Daniel in the miniseries Falling for a Dancer. "That was the first professional job I auditioned for, and I got it during my summer holidays from the Gaiety. I was so nervous, I nearly had to wear a nappy, but I learned more on that shoot in two months than I'd learn in drama school for the rest of my life."
From Falling for a Dancer he went on to a small role in Tim Roth's upcoming directorial debut, War Zone, and appeared in a production of Gary Mitchell's play In a Little World of Our Own at the Donmar Warehouse in London.
"It was just the greatest buzz doing that play, because from the moment the curtain goes up until it goes down, you're on your own. So I'd give my right arm to do something like that again."
But movies and television continued to beckon. A chance meeting in London led to the part in Ordinary Decent Criminal, Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Dublin gangster movie.
"Kevin Spacey was in town doing The Iceman Cometh and he came to In a Little World of Our Own on his night off. He loved the play and I ended up hanging out with him a bit in London. He told me about Ordinary Decent Criminal and that there might be something in that for me, so I met Thaddeus and read for the part." He plays the youngest member of Spacey's gang of hoodlums, "a spear carrier, really". Farrell's Dublin agent, Lisa Cook, hooked him up with CAA (Creative Artists Agency, one of the top Hollywood agencies), which signed him last year. The next step, once he'd finished on Ordinary Decent Criminal, was a trip to Los Angeles just before Christmas, "prostituting myself for three weeks," he says cheerfully, to do the rounds of the studios, meeting producers and casting people. It was his first visit to the US. "It was fascinating but I couldn't live there. I had great fun, and met some nice people, but everyone I met was in the industry, and with most of them they were just looking at you, sussing you out. That's the way it works, and it obviously works very well for them.
"We went to Paramount first, and then to CAA, which is a big, huge, f**ck-off building. It's got this lobby - I nearly got killed for calling it a lobby - it's an atrium, with these agents flying around, and they're all between the ages of 22 and 27, all of them good-looking for some reason. We walked in and there's 25 of them sitting there with their salads and their decaffs, and I felt like the queen, because they're all introducing themselves and their names are going right over my head. They sit me down at the head of the table and went through a little biography of what I've done, which took at least 30 seconds, and then asked me to talk about myself for a minute. I just went bleaarrrgh . . . `I'm this, I'm that, I drink Carlsberg, I like football'.
"They find your honesty humorous, because they all tell lies for a living. If you go in and say sorry I'm a bit hungover today, they all go `Oh, you Irish . . .' I knew it would be full of shit, and there'd be sharks everywhere, but I thought they'd be able to hide that much better. It only took me a day to realise the place was rotten."
He stops for a moment and laughs. "And I'm never going to work there now! But I really met loads of nice people. I met Courtney Love - that was mad . . . like meeting a legend. My ma wasn't very impressed, though."
He would love to get the chance to work in Hollywood, he insists. "To see it all from the inside would be deadly. I'd go over there like a shot if I got the chance for a job, but I couldn't live that life."
He suspects he might be wiser anyway to stay out of the feeding frenzy in LA. "Maybe you have an edge if you're not that hungry, if you have a family and friends and a life. Ambition is much more attractive if it's fuelled by a passion rather than just greed."
WITH CAA representing him, he acknowledges, he has suddenly moved several rungs up the ladder. "All of a sudden I'm reading to play Michael Douglas's pupil, and Tommy Lee Jones's son." It all seems to have been incredibly easy so far, he admits. So what's it like being a budding movie star in Castleknock these days? "Well, I have the piss taken out of me by my mates and my brother, and those who don't know me might think I've turned arrogant, but I don't think I have. If it's all taken away from me tomorrow I have a family and friends that I love and I'll find something else to do."