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Irish actor Colin Farrell takes a star turn in the controversial
Phone Booth
by Angela Baldassarre
There’s no question that Colin Farrell is a
movie star. Only 26 years old, extremely good looking, talented and
with a definite devilish streak, it’s no wonder that Hollywood
has latched onto the Dubliner and is not going to be letting go anytime
soon.
“It’s wild, ain’t it,” he says
in his thick Irish accent. “They keep saying that I’m an overnight
success, but that’s really not true. I started acting when I was
16, but it’s only been the past couple of years that they’ve
figured out who I am here.”
The first time this scribe laid her eyes on the Irish
actor was in Tim Roth’s directorial debut The War Zone,
where his turn as the brother of a girl sexually abused by their father
(Ray Winstone) quickly managed to impress.
But it was his role as the rebellious soldier in Joel
Schumacher’s Tigerland that caused Hollywood brass and North
American film critics to wake up and take notice. While reviews as a
whole were positive, most critics singled out Farrell as the flawed
hero and leading man his Hollywood generation has been waiting for.
The part won him the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actor
in 2000.
Three major films later — American Outlaws,
Hart’s War and Minority Report — and Farrell
is back with Schumacher, this time in Phone Booth, where he plays
a publicist held hostage in a New York City phone booth by a sniper.
“He’s about to live the life as a complete
asshole,” said Farrell when he was in Toronto recently. “But
it’s time to start being accountable. And that, to me, was the
essence of the film.”
Phone Booth experienced a major setback last
November when its release date was postponed indefinitely following
the slew of sniper deaths in the Maryland and D.C. areas of the United
States. There were fears that Phone Booth would go the way of
Donnie Darko, that terrific independent film that never saw a
theatrical release in Canada because of the September 11th terrorist
attacks (the film contains a scene of a plane crashing). Thankfully,
now that the snipers have been caught, and the fear subsided, Phone
Booth is finally getting its much- deserved release this April.
“I loved making the film, and I loved the way
Joel shot it,” smiles Farrell, referring to the fact that Schumacher
shot the picture in chronological order at roughly 10 script pages a
day. “I just got rid of a lot of excess emotion that had been building.
I wish I could do every movie like that one.”
The son of Irish soccer star Eamon Farrell, Colin
began acting while in high school and quickly became a household name
as a regular on the hit series Ballykissangel, a role he auditioned
for a few months after dropping out from the Gaiety Drama School in
Dublin.
Two years on the series and the restless actor was
testing his chops on the London stage, including In a Little World
of Our Own at the Donmar Warehouse where he was noticed by Kevin
Spacey. Spacey then convinced director Thaddeus O’Sullivan to cast
the young actor opposite him in the gangster movie Ordinary Decent
Criminal. That experience convinced him to get an agent in the US.
It was only a matter of weeks before he was called in to audition for
Tigerland. “And the rest, as they say, is history.”
It is indeed. Married and divorced from actress Amelia
Warner (Quills) after only four months of marriage (“I was
crazy for her, I still love her, but things got in the way”), Farrell
shuttles his life between the US and Dublin, making sure to bring most
of his family and friends along with him.
“People say I have a devil-may-care attitude,”
he smiles. “Which, I guess, I really do. But I make sure I take
care of the people I care about. I’ve always felt that the only
way I can be happy in what I do is if the people I love are happy too.”
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