“I have no problem”: how Colin Farrell turned being second choice into a career
It’s usually in football parlance that the idea of being a ‘super sub’ is most commonly uttered, describing a player who comes off the bench to dramatically score the winner more than once. Well, in Hollywood, back in the day, that super sub could well have been Colin Farrell, and he was absolutely fine with it.
Farrell was trying to make his way in movies after graduating from British TV at the tail end of the 1990s and was auditioning for directors like Falling Down’s Joel Schumacher, who was casting for a gritty Vietnam War drama called Tigerland. He had met Farrell, who was then in his early 20s, in a hotel in London and encouraged him to send him some acting clips.
Farrell did exactly that, but probably summing up the kind of place he was at during that stage of his life, he did it with some Dutch courage, getting his sister to film him doing a couple of scenes in a Texan accent that he later regretted, saying “I sounded like [A Streetcar Named Desire character] Blanche DuBois”, and causing Schumacher to believe that the whole submission seemed to be fuelled by pints of Guinness.
Nevertheless, the director saw something in him and cast him in the lead role in the film that got excellent reviews but bombed in quite spectacular fashion on release, bringing in less than $200k at the box office against a $10million spend and almost putting an end to Farrell’s career before he’d even started. The Irishman later reflected, “One of the most frustrating things about it really was that I did great out of it, but a lot of the other actors didn’t”.
Fortunately, his ambition and performance had not gone unnoticed by casting directors, and when Matt Damon turned down the Tom Cruise sci-fi movie Minority Report two years later, he stepped in. He did it again the same year when Edward Norton dropped out of Hart’s War, and made it a 2002 hat-trick when Joel Schumacher came back to him to play the lead in the New York City thriller Phone Booth after Jim Carrey gave it up, citing the fact he didn’t feel comfortable in the part.
It proved to be the making of him as a Hollywood A-lister, and he admitted at the time: “I have no problem being second place in people’s minds to Matt Damon, Jim Carrey and Edward Norton”.
He was cast opposite one of the best in history, Al Pacino, in the following year’s The Recruit, and then Marvel came calling to cast him as Bullseye in Ben Affleck’s Daredevil, at which point he was one of the most in-demand young actors in the industry. But personal issues and scandal followed a few years later, and it wasn’t until his Golden Globe-winning performance in Martin McDonagh’s debut In Bruges that he fully found redemption.
Since then, he has become one of the most respected actors in movies, Academy Award-nominated for McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin in 2023, for which he won a third Golden Globe award and received huge acclaim for his performance in HBO’s Batman spin-off The Penguin, which at this point won’t be returning for a second season.
Farrell will be returning as the Penguin in The Batman Part II, however, with Robert Pattinson’s ‘Caped Crusader’ sequel hitting cinemas in 2027.
