Washington DC [US], September 29 : Actor Colin Farrell received the Golden Icon Award at the Zurich Film Festival, in recognition of his career achievements. He discussed the "extraordinary, unearned good fortune" that has been his life in cinema, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Growing up in Dublin, Farrell had no intention of acting. "I wanted to be a footballer, a soccer player. I was handy enough," he recalled. His father had played professionally for Dublin club Shamrock Rovers, and sports were "the one way my father and I could have communication and a relationship. It was tricky everywhere else, but when it came to football, we were good to go."
His dream of a professional soccer career ended when, "I started drinking and smoking and all that stuff." Acting came through his sister Catherine, who attended theatre school. "It was the first time in my life when I heard that she was going to, quote, unquote, study acting. It sounded ridiculous. I didn't think it was something you could apply yourself to within a formal structure."
Farrell followed his sister to the theatre school. "Which gave me the chance to do something I do very well, which is drop out," he said. "I dropped out and started working."
Farrell landed a role in the popular BBC series Ballykissangel and got his first film role in Tim Roth's directorial debut The War Zone (1999) -- alongside his The Ballad of a Small Player co-star Tilda Swinton. But it was Joel Schumacher who changed everything, casting the still-unknown Irishman in Tigerland (2000) as a young soldier going through boot camp before heading over to Vietnam, as per The Hollywood Reporter.
"Joel kind of changed my life," Farrell said. "He wanted a bunch of unknown actors. He took a chance on an Irish kid."
Later, he got an opportunity to work alongside "my childhood heroes," from Tom Cruise in Minority Report to Al Pacino in The Recruit. "I got to work with Al Pacino in my third year of acting on film. It was pure bananas."
"At a certain point, big Hollywood stopped calling. I got a certain reputation, which I probably earned," he added.
The turning point came with Martin McDonagh's 'In Bruges' in 2008. "I read the script, loved it, and then I tried to talk Martin out of casting me," Farrell said. McDonagh didn't listen.
"It was a bit of a turning point. It might have been the first job I did sober," he recalled.
In Bruges was a hit, and the role marked the beginning of Farrell's second act, defined by more personal, often darker choices, from Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer to his Venice-winning, Oscar-nominated performance in McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin, as per The Hollywood Reporter.