Was Colin Farrell better as a bad boy?
Once the king of the party scene he’s now a clean-living yoga fan but
IT may be a memory lost in the sands of time, but try to think back to when Colin Farrell was Hollywood’s bad boy.
There wasn’t a woman alive who didn’t feel a tiny bit jealous when the iconic images of Farrell on a date with Britney Spears appeared; his arm draped proprietarily over the once-virginal pop princess, her looking pleased as punch (though as we now know, mired in personal turbulence of her own).
The heady brew of swarthy bad lad and down-to-earth Irishman translated into onscreen gold too, with roles in Minority Report and The Recruit singling out the youngster as one to watch.
And it wasn’t just Britney — women everywhere swooned at his feet, making him Ireland’s hottest export since Guinness, which he was drinking enough of too.
Hollywood was enthralled with the tale of the young Irishman rushing on the road to ruin.
Only a few years ago, Farrell admitted just how bad his struggles with drink and drugs had been. And where he was once hailed as the finest actor of his generation, a haze of excess saw the Dubliner implode.
Speaking of his experience of working on Miami Vice in 2006, he admitted: ‘It was interesting because I couldn’t remember a single frame of doing it.
“I was at the premiere and didn’t know what was happening next. It was strange because I was in it. The second it was finished I was put on a plane and sent to rehab as everyone else was going to the wrap party.’
COLIN’S bad behaviour gave a frisson of excitement to so many women — who could forget when actress Eileen Atkins claimed she rejected the star’s advances at the ripe old age of 70?
In time, his love of life in the (very) fast lane would come to light. ‘I had high tolerance for various drugs for years,’ he admitted on the Late Late Show. ‘When I drank with my mates, we’d go to a pub on Wednesday night and have six pints, everyone would go home. I’d get a bag of powder, four joints, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and drink until five in the morning. My family were trying to get me into rehab.’
Farrell said he knew he was in danger of dying from substance abuse unless he changed.And change he did.
These days, Farrell is teetotal, and more inclined to wax lyrical about his sons (Henry, 7, and James, 13), saunas and yoga than anything else. So devotedly clean-living is Farrell these days that the only hangovers he gets are, he says, ‘chocolate hangovers’.
Not exactly the actions of a bad boy. And even Farrell is all too aware of how close he teeters to parody. ‘If (my younger self) heard me talking about yoga, he’d think “w **** r!”’ he said in an interview. ‘If 25-year-old Colin came in here now, I would have to leave the room.’
It may have dulled his appeal in the eyes of some — and on first glance, a look at his career might lead you to believe if any Hollywood leading man is in dire need of a “McConnaissance” — a career reboot as mastered by Matthew McConaughey — it’s Colin.
There have been box office duds galore down the years: Miss Julie, Winter’s Take and Dead Man Down were savaged by the critics. But-shying away from leading man status is, seemingly, where Farrell seems comfortable. He stole the show in Horrible Bosses opposite Jennifer Aniston, and played the father of Emma Thompson’s character in Saving Mr. Banks.
On the other hand, Star turns in The Lobster, Seven Psychopaths and In Bruges (for which he won a Golden Globe) have proven a penchant for more indie/arthouse fare. This summer, he appears in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film The Killing Of A Scared Deer, which won Best Screenplay award at Cannes in May. This month saw the release of Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, where he teams up again with Nicole Kidman.
And now that he’s sober and sane, Colin Farrell seems like a lot more fun. After all, a beer-swilling bad boy who parties all night is not really what women want when it comes to stable relationships.
Where men like the old Colin might have been fun to share a pint with in your 20s, the endless party boy is never really seen as marriage material and would be avoided by women looking for long-term committment from the age of 30 onwards.
And a life away from the glare seems to suit him just fine. Where once he was famous in Hollywood for being too candid, he’s no longer the go to for a shocking soundbite.
Farrell’s clean-living ways appear to have created a ‘happy ever after’ for him too. After a string of high profile exes (among them, reportedly, Demi Moore, and Elle McPherson), he’s thought to be seeing a nonfamous woman… with Hollywood’s gossip giants trying in vain to find out her name. We may not be privy to the finer details anymore, but it’s safe to assume Farrell’s now a better version of the Castleknock Charmer.