Colin Farrell Tries the Soulful Route, One Step at a Time
LONDON — Thirteen years ago, after receiving the worst critical thrashing of his life for the film “Alexander,” the Irish actor Colin Farrell came up with what he felt was a brilliant plan to cope with the humiliation.
“Where can I wear a ski mask and not actually be put against the wall by a bunch of SWAT cops?” he recalls asking himself.
The answer: Lake Tahoe, California, where Mr. Farrell spent the next few days masked and drunk, and fighting the urge to apologize to moviegoers for wasting their money. No anecdote fully captures a person’s complexities, but this one helps explain the widespread fondness for Mr. Farrell. A sensitive scoundrel is hard to resist, especially a movie star willing to admit that a public excoriation was, in the end, a good thing.
“I was due a kick in the arse. I really, really was,” said Mr. Farrell, 41. “Because I was annoying. I had so much, so quick. I was so cocksure.”
Mr. Farrell had been playing the generic action hero, or trying to. It had not been a good fit. He drew middling reviews and cemented a reputation as a badly behaved bed-hopper with an insatiable appetite for alcohol and drugs. He entered rehab the moment his last big film, the 2006 “Miami Vice,” wrapped.
But rather than nurse his wounds or hold out to come back big, Mr. Farrell came back soulful and small, turning in performances in the 2008 indie “In Bruges” and the low-budget “Crazy Heart” that drew accolades.
Mr. Farrell has veered sharply left again, into rigorous art house territory, starring in the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The Lobster,” from 2015, and now “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” which opens worldwide in November. One is about people who get forcibly changed into animals if they don’t find a romantic partner. The other is about a husband and father who might have to kill a family member after apparently being put under an evil spell. Not exactly the type of fare one would expect from a guy who played Sonny Crockett.
But with the two films, Mr. Farrell put in the most deadpan performanc- es of his career and landed some of his best reviews. This career arc, and the reaction to it, has surprised even him. During production of “The Lobster,” which earned him a Golden Globe nomination, he remembers telling his co-star Rachel Weisz that he hadn’t a clue what he was doing.
“I said, ‘It’s the most boring performance that will ever be put on film. Ever.’ It was just so dull,” Mr. Farrell said.
Lately Mr. Farrell has been in London filming Disney’s live-action “Dumbo,” directed by Tim Burton. He has spent most of the past year on film sets, and was aching to be back home in Los Angeles with his sons, aged 14 and 8.
Before “Dumbo,” Mr. Farrell was in Chicago filming “Widows” with Steve McQueen, and before that working on “Roman J. Israel, Esq.,” with Denzel Washington. And before that was “The Beguiled,” with Sofia Coppola, and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.”
A decade ago, when Martin McDonagh approached him to play a hit man for “In Bruges,” he almost turned down the part. He worried his name might scare people away.
He was just out of rehab, having finally caved to his family’s pressures to get straight. Asked what hastened his bottoming out, Mr. Farrell said it was the intensity of sudden fame.
“Getting all these platitudes and things being said about you, and all these gifts, it wasn’t in my DNA to believe any of this stuff,” he said. “You try and match the hype, but I never believed it.”
Mr. Farrell is from Castleknock, a relatively well-to- do Dublin suburb, and studied at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin before landing a role in 1998 on the BBC soap “Ballykissangel.” Hollywood beckoned next.
“I remember making a promise to myself, ‘Don’t change, don’t change, remember where you come from,’” he said. “But change is inevitable. You don’t change, you get sickness, your life will fall apart on the inside.”
His antics filled gossip pages, but he swears many of them were lost to blackouts. Asked about the time he kissed a reporter on camera on the red carpet, and his eyes widened. “Did I? Who? Which one?” he asked. “I swear to God, I lost so much time.”
He spoke about the latitude given to stars.
“The one thing that fame asks you to do, I have learned, is to police yourself,” he said. “You get away with murder, you get away with mistreating people, you won’t be called out on things you really should be called out with, you really do.”