The “really profound” 2021 role that altered Colin Farrell’s DNA: “It was life-changing, to be honest”
Prior to his movie career being underway, Colin Farrell got his start on TV as Danny Byrne in 18 episodes of the Irish drama Ballykissangel between 1998 and 1999, making a few sporadic returns to the small screen thereafter, most notably in the second season of True Detective.
Recently, he won critical acclaim for The Penguin, which saw him reprise his role from The Batman for a longer-form exploration of Gotham City’s seedy criminal underbelly, and in between True Detective and his supervillian run, there was the miniseries The North Water, based on Ian McGuire’s novel of the same name.
It starred Farrell as Henry Drax, a violent sailor aboard a whaling voyage in the Arctic Ocean, who finds himself trapped in the icy waters with Patrick Sumner (Jack O’Connell), a surgeon with a dark past, once the ship is intentionally scuppered by a captain seeking an insurance payout.
The North Water was created by Andrew Haigh (45 Years, All of Us Strangers) and aired in both the UK and Canada. Speaking to the Radio Times ahead of its release, Farrell couldn’t have given a more positive impression of working on the show.
“It was life-changing, to be honest,” he revealed, “Obviously, you come back from it, and your life looks exactly the same, but I felt that it was a really profound experience. It was one of those experiences that sometimes you’re lucky enough to have in film. Where you go through the fire enough with people that you know that if you see them in 20 years, you’ll share the mutual acknowledgement that you went through an experience that was really significant and really profound and really changed you in ways that may reveal themselves through the years.”
Haigh had developed the show over a period of about five years, and alongside Farrell and O’Connell, the cast also included Stephen Graham, Peter Mullan, and Tom Courtenay. In order to recreate the hellish conditions of the Arctic, the crew ventured further north than any production team in history to shoot scenes among the ice packs.
Farrell admitted he feared for his life on multiple occasions while filming at sea, and the production was almost curtailed by the pandemic, which shut down filming with just four days to go, but luckily, they were able to complete the remainder of the series in a studio.
The show received rave reviews upon its release, with many critics highlighting the chemistry between Farrell and O’Connell, but alas, as is the way with the modern TV landscape, it left almost no trace on popular culture, running only five episodes and never winning any major awards to then disappear beneath the waves.
While it might not have set the world on fire, Farrell’s experiences on The North Water will stay with him for the rest of his days. Examples like this prove just how much incredible stuff there is out there that, sadly, will often go unnoticed by the vast majority of people.
