“OK, I failed”: the drunken night out in Dublin that almost changed everything for Colin Farrell
Most of us have had a night out on the booze where things haven’t quite gone as planned: maybe you did some karaoke, massacred ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ by Journey, and then you fell off a table and threw up, but for Irish actor Colin Farrell the consequences of going to a particular club one night as a youngster could have been far more wide-reaching.
To say that Farrell was a bit of a loose cannon when he was in his youth would be a huge understatement, as he once said that he’d essentially been drunk or high from the age of 14, and once he began to get some traction with acting, fame pushed his partying to some extreme levels.
Aside from a string of celebrity girlfriends, there were also sex tape scandals, an arrest for attempted murder (although that turned out to be mistaken identity), and Farrell was a familiar sight looking bleary-eyed surrounded by photographers.
But back in the early 1990s, he could have taken a very different turn to fame, as in an appearance on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, Farrell recalled being out about town in Dublin in his late teens, saying, “I was dancing in a nightclub called The Pod with mates on a weekend. Louis Walsh, who’s the manager of Boyzone, came up to me and said, ‘Listen, I’m getting this band together. It’s going to be huge. You’ve got a great look, I’d like you to be in the band’.”
Walsh invited Farrell to an upcoming open audition, to which he turned up and said he was asked to sing the George Michael classic ‘Careless Whisper’, recalling, “I sang it once, and then they said, ‘Would you mind just singing that again?’ Because I don’t think they could believe how bad it was. And I sang it a second time. I didn’t fail the audition, I wasn’t as strong as I could have been…OK, I failed.”
Once Walsh had finished putting Boyzone together with the likes of Ronan Keating and Stephen Gately, they went on to be wildly successful, selling more than 25 million records worldwide and picking up six UK number-one singles.
However, despite Farrell admitting to Colbert that things could have been very different for him had he managed to join the band, he certainly made the most of his decision to try acting, which was inspired by the job done by child actor Henry Thomas in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi epic ET the Extra-Terrestrial
The actor got sober in 2005 and went on to become a three-time Golden Globe winner, in addition to being Oscar-nominated for 2023’s The Banshees of Inisherin and Emmy-nominated for his role as The Penguin in HBO’s The Batman spin-off, a character he’s about to revisit for The Batman Part II, which will hit cinemas in 2027.
He’s also signed up to appear in the lead role in Sgt Rock, a Luca Guadagnino-directed DC comics movie about a World War Two US Army officer battling Nazis, so it’s safe to say he’s done well staying away from singing.
