Colin Farrell feared for his life when filming ‘The North Water’
Colin Farrell, star of The Banshees of Inisherin, has revealed that he felt that “death was just around the corner” when filming the period drama series The North Water. The show is based on Ian McGuire’s novel of the same name, set mostly in 1859. It takes place on the whaling ship The Volunteer, set in the Arctic, with Jack O’Connell’s disgraced surgeon Patrick Summer and Farrell’s harpooner, Henry Drax, the two main characters.
Now, Farrell has reflected on shooting the show in the Arctic Ocean and the life-or-death challenges it presented. “I did feel that death was just around the corner at any given time,” he said. “That we were just one mistake away from someone falling into the Arctic sea and either very quickly getting hypothermia or sinking under the weight of the waterlogged costume.”
He continued: “There were also polar bears around, who were beautiful and elegant and majestic but also apex predators. It was a very profound experience for us all to share.”
Farrell, who was recently nominated at the Oscars for his work in Martin McDonagh’s tragicomedy The Banshees of Inisherin, said that working on The North Water was an opportunity to be “immersed in this world that was so exotic, so brutal and so different”.
“Usually they would shoot this film in a tank,” he revealed. “You might go out on to the Irish Sea, or maybe off the coast of England or Scotland, a little bit towards the North Sea, and you’d do a week or two out there and get grand vistas. But Andrew (director Andrew Haigh) insisted we went up there, up to the 82nd parallel.”
Over the four weeks of filming, the crew were isolated on a boat with no mobile or internet reception. Farrell recalled: “It instantly created a sense of tension and pressure. Your body, physiologically, is responding in a way and with an aggression that my body has never responded to the environment with before, because it’s never been in an environment like that. Even that, instantly, whether you like it or not, removes you from what is familiar in your reality, my reality.”
He said: “There wasn’t much room for rehearsal, but we had a little time to get familiar with boats and rowing. We had this collective communal experience and then each of us had our own individual profound experience of being up in that beautiful, hostile part of the world.”
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