Colin Farrell: Irish film's Oscar-nominated renaissance man is ready for his second act

From rapid ascent to a vertiginous fall from grace, Colin Farrell has come full circle, finding himself on the cusp of Oscar glory 23 years into his career. This is no surprise to Ed Power, who says it all began with a little movie called In Bruges

Colin Farrell attends the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at Fairmont Century Plaza on February 26, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.

The renaissance in the career of Colin Farrell has been 15 years in the making. In 2008, not long after the Dubliner had flopped as a Hollywood leading man with the disastrous one-two of Alexander and Miami Vice, he was cast alongside Brendan Gleeson in Martin McDonagh’s vinegary comedy-drama, In Bruges.

This was a small movie that had big consequences for Farrell. It showed that there was a future for him outside mainstream movie stardom. A decade and a half on, the Dubliner, now firmly established as a character player, is up for best actor at the Academy Awards. Completing the circle, the film that has brought him to the cusp of Oscar glory is another Martin McDonagh feature, The Banshees of Inisherin.

Banshees is a broad tragicomedy that blends John Ford’s style “Oirish” sentimentality with Quentin Tarantino-style cartoon violence. And though a box-office success, it has divided Irish audiences. Some are entranced by Farrell’s over-the-top turn as a lovable idiot living on the Aran Islands in 1923. Others find Banshees cringey and riddled with stereotypes – a stock in trade of McDonagh, a Londoner with Irish roots.

America of course adores it without question. Banshees has received nine Oscar nominations — a record for an “Irish” feature (technically, it is British-produced and financed). That includes four nominations in acting categories, with Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, and Barry Keoghan acknowledged alongside Farrell.

An Oscar nomination is always special. But for Farrell, it feels especially significant. Though just 46, he’s lived through several Hollywood lifetimes. Over the past 23 years, he has shapeshifted out of his initial incarnation as a proto-Brad Pitt and into a thoughtful performer who brings a dark charm to often small and quirky parts.

A RAPID RISE

The real miracle, he might tell you, however, is that he is still around to tell the tale. Catapulted into the spotlight in Joel Schumacher’s military drama Tigerland in 2000, he was soon living out the most damaging Hollywood cliches. Farrell drank too much, took drugs, and once almost got into scuffles with a photographer (whom he thought was yelling at his sister).

Fame didn’t cause his addictions. Farrell had started drinking to excess and using drugs as a teenager back in Dublin. He started raiding his parents’ drinks cabinet aged 13. “Pubs fitted like a fucking glove,” he would tell GQ. “The first time I ever went into one and had a pint it all made sense.” Drugs followed. He says he sampled his first “class A” substance at 15. By 19, a steady intake of ecstasy, cocaine, and speed was playing havoc with his mental health. When he sought help, a psychologist asked him to write down all the things he was taking. He read the list and said: “And you wonder why you’re depressed?”

He surrounded himself with people who drank. He, though, always drank more. “For years I could indulge in certain things. I had a high tolerance for various drugs for years. I used to go bananas for five months then take the foot off the gas for two months and clean up a bit,” he said during an appearance on The Late Late Show. “I was sad. I was drinking loads. When I ever drink 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, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and drank until five in the morning.”

Even by the standards of Hollywood, he had an unusually rapid ascent and then an equally vertiginous plunge back down. In 2000, Farrell was a nobody with a small part in Ballykissangel to his credit — along with a shady background in line dancing (he’d also auditioned for Boyzone). By 2002, he was holding his own opposite Tom Cruise in Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report and then, in 2004, Oliver Stone heralded him as a new box office idol with Alexander, an OTT biopic of Alexander the Great.

A FALSE DAWN

With a rise like that, it was inevitable that the natural laws of gravity would kick in. And when both Alexander and Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (adapted from Mann’s own 1980s series) flopped, the only way was down. One morning Farrell woke to discover he was no longer the hottest name in Hollywood. It took a minute for him to catch up with reality.

“It all happened really, really fast,” he revealed in an interview with Esquire.

“ Alexander and then Miami Vice, which were films that were very big and that didn’t work so much critically and didn’t work so much financially, and I was made to feel aware of the fact that all of a sudden, things that I was in weren’t working. So it just made me go, ‘Wow, OK’. So I can’t believe in the lie that’s being presented to me anymore that I’m a movie star and that everything is great. I have this No 1 movie... Everyone is telling me now that that’s gone. So it was kind of like, ugh... all of it’s a delusion. Telling me it’s gone is a delusion. Ever believing that it was there in the first place is a delusion.”

 Colin Farrell attends the premiere of "In Bruges" in 2008 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

Miami Vice was also when he realised that he could not party like a rockstar forever. He was struck by a picture of himself taken at the wrap party for the film. He was overweight, his eyes vacant. “They’re dead. Dead,” he would say. “The night that was taken, literally that night, I got onto a plane and checked into rehab. I was just broken.” He’d been so out of it, he said, that he couldn’t remember making Miami Vice. He’d hurt his back during the shoot and, along with the boozing, developed an addiction to prescription medication.

“I’m off the jar seven or eight years. I can tell by the last film I did when I got off it,” he told Ryan Tubridy. “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. But it was strange because I was in it. The movie was Miami Vice. The second it was finished I was put on a plane and sent to rehab as everyone else was going to the wrap party.” Rehab helped him get clean. Yet the urge to throw it all away on a bonfire of excess never deserted him. The devil is always on his shoulder.

“I’d fucking love to be able to drink,” he revealed to GQ. “I would love to have a couple of nights fucking howling at the moon. I miss howling at the moon. And not just have a drink, I’d love to get fucked up. I’d love to be able to pop some fucking Oxycontin or some Percocet (the prescription painkillers to which he became addicted after Miami Vice) and know that it’s not going to become a fucking habit. Turn on, tune in, drop out, I’d love it.”

THE ROAD BACK

In Bruges was the start of the Farrell-naissance. It isn’t a small part — he and Gleeson are on-screen practically the entire film as a pair of inept criminals cooling their heels in Belgium. But the film wasn’t a blockbuster and so Farrell wasn’t required to carry on his shoulders the dead weight of a studio’s expectations.

There have been a few reversals in the years since — a reboot of Total Recall with Farrell in the Arnold Schwarzenegger part flopped badly. But he showed that he could burn lean in and mean in and in the second season of True Detective (where he was the only one who came away with reputation enhanced). And now here he is on the cusp of Oscar victory. It’s been quite a journey for the shy kid from Castleknock. And whether he wins or loses at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Farrell will know that in some ways, the second act of his career has only just begun.