Colin Farrell on His “Extraordinary, Unearned Good Fortune,” From ‘Tigerland’ to ‘The Penguin’

In The Ballad of a Small Player, Edward Berger’s adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel, Colin Farrell plays Lord Doyle, an Irish con man and high roller in Macau whose luck, he fears, may be about to run out. Farrell, however, is still on a roll.

The Irish actor received the Golden Icon Award at the Zurich Film Festival, in recognition of his career achievements and, in a wide-ranging Master Class discussion on Sunday, discussed the “extraordinary, unearned good fortune” that has been his life in cinema.

Growing up in Dublin, Farrell had no plans to act. “I wanted to be a footballer, a soccer player. I was handy enough,” he recalled. His father had played professionally for Dublin club Shamrock Rovers and sports were “the one way my father and I could have communication and a relationship. It was tricky everywhere else, but when it came to football, we were good to go.”

His dream of a professional soccer career ended when, “I started drinking and smoking and all that stuff.” Acting came via his sister Catherine, who went to theater school. “It was the first time in my life when I heard that she was going to, quote, unquote, study acting. It sounded ridiculous. I didn’t think it was something you could apply yourself to within a formal structure.”

Farrell followed his sister to theater school. “Which gave me the chance to do something I do very well, which is drop out,” he said. “I dropped out and started working.”

Farrell landed a role in the popular BBC series Ballykissangel and got his first film role in Tim Roth’s directorial debut The War Zone (1999) — alongside his The Ballad of a Small Player co-star Tilda Swinton. But it was Joel Schumacher who changed everything, casting the still-unknown Irishman in Tigerland (2000) as a young soldier going through boot camp before heading over to Vietnam.

“Joel kind of changed my life,” Farrell said. “He wanted a bunch of unknown actors. He took a chance on an Irish kid.”

After Tigerland, Farrell’s rise was meteoric, leading to roles in Hollywood productions working alongside “my childhood heroes,” from Tom Cruise in Minority Report to Al Pacino in The Recruit. “I got to work with Al Pacino in my third year of acting on film. It was pure bananas.”

The speed of it all was overwhelming. “It was so loud, it was so global, and I was so unprepared,” Farrell said. “I was only 22, but I was really [emotionally] 12. I hadn’t earned it. The thing I understand now, at 49, is that there’s no earning the degree of good fortune that came my way.”

By his own admission, the combination of sudden fame and heavy drinking nearly ended his career. “At a certain point, big Hollywood stopped calling. I got a certain reputation, which I probably earned.”

The turnaround came with Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges in 2008. “I read the script, loved it, and then I tried to talk Martin out of casting me,” Farrell said. McDonagh didn’t listen.

“It was a bit of a turning point. It might have been the first job I did sober,” he recalled.

In Bruges was a hit and the role marked the beginning of Farrell’s second act, defined by more personal, often darker choices, from Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer to his Venice-winning, Oscar-nominated performance in McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin.

Farrell has also managed to slip back into blockbuster territory, most memorably as the Penguin in Matt Reeves’ The Batman. Being cast, he said, was a dream come true for “that child in Dublin who used to draw Batman signals on his jeans.” But he admitted, on first read, he didn’t get Reeves’ take on the cartoon villain.

“I was so excited when I got the script and then I read it and was like ‘I’ve only got five scenes,’” he recalled. “I didn’t really get it either. I thought he was a bit silly, a bit of a putz.” It wasn’t until Reeves showed him the mockup of how Farrell would look, unrecognizable, in his Penguin makeup, that the penny dropped.

“I’ll never forget it. Matt went: ‘Come in, come in.’ And he opened up his laptop and showed it to me. The first time I saw it, the cogs crunched. Everything in the script became clear. Every little pockmark. The character was ferocious looking, but I could imagine every aspect of the character’s life, even moving ones. It just gave me so much information,” Farrell said.

The part proved strong enough to launch HBO’s spin-off The Penguin, where Farrell got to dive deep into the character. “I can do five hours a day riffing as the Penguin, and even my sense of humor changes. I’d call my kids in character.”

Farrell will be back as the Penguin in Reeves’ The Batman: Part II, even though he says, “I’ve got an even smaller role in this one. But I’m OK with that…I’ve read the script, from start to finish, and I can’t say much about it. But it’s deeper, scarier, the stakes are bigger. I’m really excited to see it.”

Working on The Ballad of a Small Player also pushed Farrell into new territory. A fan of Edward Berger’s since his 2018 Showtime series Patrick Melrose, Farrell had been talking to the German director about Small Player “since before [Berger’s Oscar-winning movies] All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave.”

They shot the film on location in Macau, which, Farrell said, was “an assault on the senses. It’s incredibly loud, the colors are brash and bombastic. It’s how I felt reading the script. I flew through the script, but I kind of felt nauseous reading it as well. There’s nothing subtle about it.”

As for his character, Lord Doyle, Farrell described him as “somebody who’s on the precipice of insanity…he’s living in an incredibly aggressive kind of spiritual or emotional vacuum, with no connection to anyone. Like all addicts, regardless of what the addiction is, who inevitably end up in an emotional or spiritual vacuum.”

The experience of making the film left him “fairly raw…everyone was fairly wrecked by the end of it,” Farrell said, noting he is looking forward to not working for a while and spending time at home with the kids.

Reflecting on what has been an extraordinary career with its share of awards —the Golden Icon honor follows a decade of awards heat, from a Golden Globe win and best actor nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin to a best actor Emmy nomination for The Penguin, Farrell said he’s wary of the seductions that come with accolades. The point isn’t winning, he argued; it’s staying connected. “The nominations are the most joyous part of it,” he said. “Winning an award is a little bit of separation. The real juice is just being part of the community, when you and another group of actors are told: You did OK.”