The two movies that almost ruined Colin Farrell
These days, Colin Farrell is enjoying some of the highest praise of his career. His transformative performance as Oz Cobb in The Penguin is so perfectly calibrated that he’s been able to make the character his own while buried under a reported 800 pieces of prosthetics on his face alone. On top of that, he isn’t too far removed from his ‘Best Actor’ nomination at the 95th Academy Awards in 2023 for his hilariously tragic turn in The Banshees of Inisherin. At the moment, everything is coming up Farrell.
This wasn’t always the case, though. Farrell has been remarkably open about making two movies which did serious damage to his physical and mental health. In fact, you could say they almost ruined him.
In 2006, Farrell starred as Sonny Crockett alongside Jamie Foxx as Ricardo Tubbs in Michael Mann’s big-budget reimagining of his iconic 1980s show Miami Vice. The stage seemed set for a new action franchise anchored by two of the best young stars in the game—but reception to the movie was tepid at the box office and in the bylines of critics. Farrell even admitted in 2010 that he wasn’t the biggest fan of the movie, telling Total Film, “I didn’t like it so much—I thought it was style over substance, and I accept a good bit of responsibility.”
Much worse than that, though, were the personal issues which plagued him throughout production and led to him checking into a rehabilitation clinic as soon as the shoot finished. The honest star later appeared on The Jonathan Ross Show and confessed, “By the end of Miami Vice, I was just done. Basically, I’d been fairly drunk or high since I was 14. I was very drunk and high for 16 years, so it was a tough life change, and I was dying.” Luckily, he was able to get clean and turn his life around, concluding, “I’m one of the lucky ones.”
The other film which hurt Farrell so much that he considered quitting the acting profession entirely was Oliver Stone’s lamentable 2004 historical epic Alexander. If the reception to Miami Vice was middling, then the response afforded to Alexander could only be classed as hostile. It tanked at the box office, was savaged by critics, and was nominated for a host of Golden Raspberry Awards. Farrell personally came in for a lot of flack for his performance, too, and he didn’t quite know how to handle it at the time.
The In Bruges star once admitted to The Mirror, “That was tough. I say tough relative to a charmed life, but I’m not going to apologise for how much it affected me emotionally and psychologically. I was going to walk away from acting. I couldn’t buy a packet of cigarettes without feeling I needed to apologise to the guy behind the counter in case they saw the fucking thing.”
Perhaps the abject failure of Alexander hurt more than the failure of any other movie for one simple reason—everyone involved expected it to be an Academy Award contender. With his tongue only slightly in cheek, Farrell confirmed, “We all had our tuxedos ready. I’m not even joking. We were all like, ‘Right, lads, we’re off to the Oscars. This is a sure thing.’ And then it came out. The reviews came out, and I remember someone going, ‘Oh God, it’s not good.’ And my publicist going, ‘It’s really not good.'”
