Total professional

After a few years out of the spotlight, Colin Farrell is back with a major blockbuster. He talks life after rehab and fatherhood with Will Lawrence.

COLIN Farrell is feeling philosophical. “Take a man’s desire,” he muses, “take a 65-year-old man’s desire to sleep with as many younger women as he can, like women who are 25 or 30. Is that born of desire or fear?”

It’s probably born of a Viagra prescription. “Right,” he laughs. “That’s desire, but is it perhaps born of fear, a fear of mortality, or of not being attractive enough? I have a great respect for the amount of fear that as a man I have in my life, whatever that fear might be.”

And what might it be? “The fear that I’m not a good actor, I’m not a good father, I’m not a good friend, fear I’m not going to leave my mark, a fear that I won’t get to experience next year, whatever it is.”

That’s quite a lot of fears, although, to be honest, Farrell can probably put some of those worries to bed. The 36-year-old Dubliner has been out of the Hollywood spotlight these few years past — ever since he checked into rehab in the wake of shooting 2006 release Miami Vice.

Now, he’s back with his first major blockbuster, a sure sign that his acting talent is still recognised by the Hollywood moneymen. The film is a big budget re-imagining of the 1990 sci-fi favourite Total Recall. It’s a big movie, and it’ll bring Farrell directly back into the spotlight. How does he feel about a remake, and stepping into the over-sized shoes of the man who fronted the first Total Recall film, Schwarzenegger?

“How did it feel stepping into Arnold’s shoes?” he asks. “It was roomy. No, honestly, I didn’t feel any of the pressure. I am a huge fan of the original Total Recall.

“I was a big fan of Arnie’s stuff as a kid, too, I’m talking Red Heat, Commando, obviously Terminator, and Predator is still to this day one of the best action films I think I have ever seen. I love his stuff, so thank God I didn’t feel pressure to fill those shoes or compete with that ability to throw out a one-liner. Ours really felt like a different film.”

It is inspired by the famous short story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ by sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, which also inspired the first film, shot by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. But while Verhoeven’s film has endured as something of a camp favourite, courtesy of Arnie’s performance and the colourful post-’80s world that’s meant to be a vision of the future, the reboot is imbued with an altogether darker, more serious and more intimidating atmosphere.

“I really approached our film more as a drama,” Farrell says, “set against the backdrop of these magnificent cityscapes and these really elaborate action scenes. My brother’s a massive sci-fi fan, while I’m not that into it, though obviously I love things like Alien.”

Farrell has dipped into sci-fi previously with 2002’s Minority Report. “And actually with Minority Report and Total Recall, they’re not dissimilar visions of the future,” he adds.

“They’re both inspired by Philip K. Dick’s work, and while his stories in literary form are open to interpretation and expansion, he inspired a certain world format. Sci-fi generally seems to be a fertile ground for drama.

“And it also seems as though dystopian worlds create more drama,” he adds, “worlds where people are living in some sort of recognised or unrecognised sense of disconnect with their environment.

“The idea of the police state is really coming into being and there’s a suspicion among all of us. I think that the future is not so bright that any of us have to wear shades. Technology is making incredible leaps but what we are doing to ourselves as human beings is quite alarming.”

The future on offer in Farrell’s movie is very alarming, as is his treatment of one of his female co-stars. Farrell has to engage in all kinds of rough and tumble, most of it exceptionally painful, with English actress Kate Beckinsale, a fact made a little trickier by the fact that she is the wife of the film’s director, Len Wiseman.

“Kissing the director’s wife was a bit tricky,” laughs Farrell, “but beating her up was okay.” As fans of the original will recall, Quaid and his wife have something of a tempestuous relationship, although it must be said that during the remake’s dramatic on-screen punch-up Beckinsale gives as good as she gets — in fact, her character (played by Sharon Stone in the first film) probably dishes out more punishment than she receives.

“At one point, Kate had to give me a shot in the neck,” recalls Farrell, “and when we came to shoot she actually chopped me. Then she kept checking on me, when the camera was still rolling.” He adopts a posh, English female accent as he mimics Beckinsale: “She was like, ‘Sorry, darling. Sorry, darling! Ohh!’

“I’ve hit guys in the face by mistake when making films and you feel like crap afterwards,” he continues, “but the two women in this film are very tough and are well able to take care of themselves.”

The other woman in the film, alongside Beckinsale, is American superstar Jessica Biel. “She really is an action star,” says Farrell. “I came in one morning and I heard someone hitting the punch bag in the corner and it sounded as though they were giving it a merciless beating. And then I realised it was Biel!”

Farrell has clearly enjoyed his return to blockbuster moviemaking. His talents came to international attention in the wake of Tiger Land, in 2000, and he’s gone on to rack up a series of tantalising roles in films as diverse as Phone Booth, The Recruit, S.W.A.T., The New World and Ondine among many others.

Following Oliver Stone’s big-budget epic Alexander in 2004, however, and then the blockbusting interpretation of Miami Vice in 2006, Farrell has sought a series of smaller-budget movies.

In 2008 he received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor — Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for his acclaimed performance in writer-director Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy hit In Bruges. He was pretty good in Crazy Heart, too. In 2011, meanwhile, he trod a new path with Horrible Bosses and Fright Night, enjoying a little comedy en route.

“There were a couple of things in recent years that I was offered, a couple of big films, and a lot of money, but they got made without me and I’m cool with that.”

Of his move into smaller films — in recent years he’s made the likes of Cassandra’s Dream, Pride and Glory, The Way Back and London Boulevard, he says, “It’s weird, you know, but Total Recall felt more intimate than some of the smaller films I’ve done. It just happens that way and it defies explanation. It was like 100 and whatever million dollars, but I worked really, really closely with the director, Len, and with the other actors.”

Farrell spent five months living in Toronto during production. “There were all these grand action sequences and these beautiful epic worlds, but on the day it was just a bunch of actors on set, trying to figure out what the other person was feeling and doing and thinking. It was great.”

During his time out of the spotlight, Farrell says he’s been able to enjoy his work more, even though some of it has been critically or commercially dismissed, and to spend time being a dad. Farrell has two boys, James, born to American model Kim Bordenave in 2007, and Henry, born to his Ondine co-star Alicja Bachleda-Curus in 2009.

“Being a dad of two boys inspires me,” he says. So has being a father changed him at all? He lives a quieter life since his time in rehab. “Sure, but you know, being in Tuesday has changed me from being in Monday. I don’t know what ways it’s changed me, and my eldest was almost three years old before I made any significant changes, but yeah, of course.”

Born in Dublin to Eamon and Rita, his dad a handy left-half for Shamrock Rovers, Farrell grew up the youngest of four. He says that he doesn’t dwell much on his youth in Ireland but that football tends to come to the fore when he does.

“I don’t revisit it so much,” he says. “I remember very fondly the days of playing football when I was a child, long, glorious, sun-kissed summer days, smell of fresh cut grass in the air and the humming of bees also on the breeze.

“I really can remember that really distinctly, a bunch of nine-year-old boys on a grassy pitch with their T-shirts off and their T-shirts being used as goal posts, they were cool days man, they were cool days.”

He doesn’t play much these days. “I haven’t kicked a ball in a while. I would get giddy now, if a football came out. I would literally have a visceral response. I would get giddy.”

It is a shame that we haven’t got a football to hand. He looks healthy, though, and he says he’s never felt better. Even when in shape for films like Alexander, he was still on the sauce. Not any more.

“Nowadays I do keep fit. I go to the gym, do yoga,” he concedes. “Work dictates a good bit of what I do with myself, my life, and I just realised, I haven’t had a haircut that hasn’t been on a film set in 15 years.

“For this film, I ran a lot. I worked out consistently for three or four months, for five or six days a week, with weights. There’s a background to the character that is touched upon in the film where he might have some military training, which I’d need to know about. I knew it was going to be a physical shoot so I worked out a bit.

He doesn’t like running, but doesn’t mind the weights, “and I have been lifting heavier weights than I usually lift. I’m about to start a film next week and I had a particular idea of the character, physically, and while it’s not dramatically any different from Total Recall with my frame, small differences take a good deal of work.”

The film he’s about to start when we speak is the Philadelphia-set gangster thriller Dead Man Down, written by Joe Wyman and directed by Niels Arden Oplev, who shot the original, Swedish-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The star of that film and the original Millennium trilogy, Noomi Rapace, plays alongside him.

“Dead Man Down is about an Hungarian immigrant who loses his family and decides to infiltrate a gang that was responsible for the death of his daughter,” explains Farrell.

Before that comes, however, comes the eagerly anticipated Seven Psychopaths, a second feature film from In Bruges writer-director Martin McDonagh. “I have just finished with him,” says Farrell.

“I was there but I don’t have the hell idea what to expect or what the film’s going to be!

“That script really is dark.” He smiles. “They’re both tough films actually, but at least on them I don’t have to fight or kiss the director’s wife!”