Colin Farrell
Colin Farrell
Colin James Farrell is an Irish actor. He first appeared on the BBC's TV drama Ballykissangel in 1998, made his film debut in the Tim Roth-directed drama The War Zone a year later and was discovered by Hollywood when Joel Schumacher cast him in the lead in his war drama Tigerland. He then starred in Schumacher's psychological thriller Phone Boothand the American thrillers S.W.A.T. and The Recruit, establishing his international box-office appeal. During that time, he also appeared in Steven...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth31 May 1976
CityCastleknock, Ireland
CountryIreland
I mean you can go wherever you want with it really. No matter what story you're telling you're always representing some reality. You are always representing human beings, their fears, their shortcomings, their braveries, their doubts, their loves, their abilities, their brilliance and those things inevitably lead to bigger political systems, foreign policy and crime and religion. It's an action film. We are not taking a stance about big government.
The first time you hold your baby in your arms, I mean, a sense of strength and love washes over you. It washed over me and I never thought that possible.
I mean, we are tribal by nature, and sometimes success and material wealth can divide and separate - it's not a new philosophy I'm sharing - more than hardship, hardship tends to unify.
I do have the ability to explore life and to be over the moon at the smallest thing - a few pints and a craic in the pub and I'm in heaven. But I have a melancholy side to me as well. Acting allows me to feel things, it kind of buys me human experience. And I don't mean this as acting as higher cause, because it's not, but it does kind of have a higher awareness emotionally.
I think, as human beings, we at times overvalue the intellect and we undermine the body. I don't mean a body externally and the shape of a body. I mean the intelligence of a body, the memories that a body can store, how a body feels emotion, and how a body processes emotion.
I just recently realized. It's very strange. But doing fight scenes with Kate [Beckinsale], I was little bit more cautious. You can go harder with a guy, which I don't mean as an insult.
I love working with horses. People say you shouldn't work with animals and children; that's wrong. You must only work with children, because you only work eight hours a day and I love working with animals. Animals have an honesty that human beings reach to find in their lives at the best of times.
Most of actor's work is done at home, in your hotel room, in the wee hours of the morning thinking and reading and feeling, walking around and listening to music. It really just because an internal exercise, whatever skills. It's great if you have to learn something new for a gig and designing a character physically is always fun but it does become an internal exercise in separating the wheat from the chaff.
I have a piano in my living room that I mess around on a little bit and when I asked Len [Wiseman] if I could find a piece of music, I went through a **** load of classical music to find something that I felt had a certain urgency to it, but also with a hint of melancholia and maybe a sense of longing. I found that which is public domain and I had a piano teacher to go through it with me.
I think there were six or eight weeks between 'Total Recall' and 'Seven Psychopaths.' I was at home in Los Angeles for 'Seven Psychopaths,' so it was the first time I had worked from my house here so it was great to be around the kids.
It as an argument between the world of emotion versus the world of the intellect. It's the idea that you can suppress a person's mind and a person's experiences, mentally, psychologically and intellectually, but you can't completely quiet them to the point of dormancy and the emotionally life a person. You still have the heart and what the heart remembers and what the heart experiences. And even that isn't important that that comes across.
Audiences will see what they want to see. Some will come out, hopefully enjoying two hours of action. Some people will find themselves gravitating towards the emotional dilemma that the characters find themselves in. Other people will see that there is some layer of subversions to the storytelling aspect of poking a finger of judgment at certain governments to the idea of foreign invasion, others maybe false pretenses.
Hollywood. It lacks originality. Remake sucks.' But I had to look deeper into it from my own perspective. We are not trying to compete with the original at all and that's what allowed me to pull the trigger without any hesitancy .
Yeah loads of bruises and welts, usually around the hip, arse, thigh region and elbows. Elbows got knocked up big time, but it was so much fun. I hadn't done a meaty action film in seven or eight years, so it was fun to explore that aspect of storytelling again.