Success can be dangerous when you’re young. I’d go bananas on booze and drugs ... now I do yoga
and drugs easier to get hold of. He has previously admitted: “I used to go bananas for five months then take the foot off the gas for two months and clean up a bit. I was sad. I was drinking loads.”
Colin has also recalled how he’d “get a bag of powder, four joints and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and drink until five in the morning.”
He got to a point when pure oblivion, even death, was tempting. In a shocking admission, he once revealed: “I remember thinking one day that I’ll go to New York, buy £2000 worth of smack and rent a bedsit, put black sacks on the window and shoot up until I die.”
Thankfully, soon after came his wake-up call.
After finishing Miami Vice in 2005, he flew himself straight to rehab, where he “began to come out of the haze I had burrowed myself into so deeply.” And of course, notoriety came at a price. Memorably, there was a leaked sex tape scandal.
Made privately in 2003 with Playboy model Nicole Narain, he obtained a court order blocking its distribution in January 2006, but copies still appeared online.
Porn bosses even offered him £4million to distribute the 14-minute video, which he declined.
While being linked to a string of women, he had his first marriage of sorts, tying the knot with actress Amelia Warner in a non-legally binding ceremony in Tahiti in 2001. Perhaps most bizarre of all, was his coupling with Taylor. He called her “a spectacular woman” and described the relationship as “romantic”. When she died in 2011, he read a poem at her funeral.
James is his child with US model Kim Bordenave, and Henry with ex-wife, Polish actress Alicja Bachleda-Curus.
But that moment of realisation after Miami Vice, and his stint in rehab, was a tipping point in terms of his sobriety and flings, and Colin has stuck to the straight and narrow ever since.
And his resolve didn’t hurt his career, either.
In 2008 he won a Best Actor Golden Globe for his part in the hit film In Bruges. Since then, with roles in True Detective and last year’s The Lobster, he’s become a go-to in the indie world of cinema, too. Offscreen, his boys are his world. In his eldest, James, who has Angelman syndrome – a neuro-genetic disorder – he finds a special fulfilment.
“We share in the smallest victories – the first words at age six or seven, being able to feed oneself and getting the seizures under control,” he said.
And his acting too, although he says it isn’t his main priority anymore, is now more fulfilling than ever.
“I want to be able to tell interesting stories and do good work. I don’t need the kind of attention that comes with doing big films all the time,” he says.
His new film is The Beguiled, a loose remake of the original 1971 Clint Eastwood classic, in which Colin plays a wounded soldier from the north forced to hide out at a private girls’ school in the south. Colin enjoyed working with director Sofia Coppola and actors Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning.
“It wasn’t what you would call a hard day at the office,” he said. “Sofia created a very special working environment and it was very easy to work with three incredibly talented women in Nicole, Kirsten and Elle.
“Being able to enjoy the experience of working with incredible actors is something that’s more important than ever to me. “I lost that for a while.” Colin played Percival Graves in JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where