Colin Farrell on the “painful” failure of 2004 movie ‘Alexander’
Even though the Irish actor Colin Farrell is a popular name in Hollywood cinema, he somehow feels like an underrated star, having never even been nominated for an Academy Award or a BAFTA. Elevating any film he appears in, no matter the role, whether it’s as the comedic hitman of Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges or the guilty father of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Farrell always brings his A-game, sprinkling his performances with careful emotional nuance.
Whilst he has impressed in the films of Steven Spielberg, Terrence Malick, Terry Gilliam, Steve McQueen, Sofia Coppola, Guy Ritchie, and Tim Burton, one of Farrell’s most celebrated performances of recent years came in Matt Reeves’ The Batman. Starring as the villainous Penguin under several layers of impressive prosthetics, Farrell played the iconic comic-book character like a snivelling gangster from The Sopranos.
Whilst Paul Dano provided much of the terror as The Riddler in Reeves’ movie, it was Farrell’s character that many remembered, with Penguin sure to play a significant part in the future of the film series. But, before his forays into superhero cinema, Farrell enjoyed several historical roles, appearing as an English captain in Malick’s The New World, an army private in Joel Schumacher’s Tigerland, and, most memorably, Alexander the Great in Oliver Stone’s 2004 flop Alexander.
Despite being helmed by the competent filmmaker behind such classics as JFK, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, and starring cinema icons like Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Val Kilmer, Christopher Plummer and Rosario Dawson, Alexander was poorly received by fans and critics alike.
Speaking about the failure of the movie at a Rome Film Festival press conference for his 2008 film Pride and Glory, Farrell admitted: “Alexander hurt, you know — and again people are going to say ‘Get over it, you were well paid’ and all that. But Alexander hurt”. Continuing, he adds, “The response that it got was really painful and all of us got a really hard time, and I didn’t come across too well either in the majority of reviews and even with the audiences — people did not respond to it”.
Reviews were scathing at the time, with critics annoyed at the three-hour runtime and the talky, emotionally distant drama. Alexander was an expensive flop, too, with the $155 million budget barely matching the box office numbers of $167.3 million, and continued Stone’s string of mediocre movies that had started with U-Turn and Any Given Sunday.
“It was a film that was made to be seen by many people,” Farrell further explained about the film’s lack of commercial love, adding, “Not many people saw it and they weren’t particularly fond of it, and that was s**t, it was really s**t”.
At the annual Golden Raspberry Awards, Farrell and his co-stars Angelina Jolie and Val Kilmer were each nominated for Worst Actor, and the lead star found the flop a tricky one to get over. “I took it to heart,” he concludes, “I felt like I had let a lot of people down, I felt like I had disappointed a lot of people … And it took a while to get over that”.
