For Colin Farrell, portraying broken characters in his latest works, “Ballad of a Small Player” and “The Penguin,” has offered a chance not only to lean into new emotional and physical challenges, but also embrace the near possession that comes with performing under heavy makeup.
Farrell discussed his latest works at the Zurich Film Festival, where he presented Edward Berger’s gambling drama and accepted the event’s Golden Icon Award.
The Irish actor also spoke openly about his eventful career, which took off with Joel Schumacher’s 2000 Vietnam War-era film “Tigerland,” leading to major Hollywood films like Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report,” Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” and Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice” before waning as a result of his own personal excesses.
In playing Lord Doyle, the character in “Ballad of a Small Player,” Farrell portrays a gambling addict in the casino mecca of Macau, a high roller who’s quickly running out of luck and breaking down both physically and mentally.
“He’s somebody who’s on the precipice of a kind of insanity, and that also has its physical implications as well,” Farrell explained. “There is something going on with his heart that he doesn’t quite understand, whether it’s anxiety or whether it’s some kind of cardiac issue.”
Like a car engine hitting the red line, Lord Doyle is “constantly anxious, fever-pitch energy, and a kind of a mania has overtaken him born of desperation. … He is living in an incredibly aggressive kind of spiritual or emotional vacuum, no connection to anyone, like addicts, regardless of what the addiction is, inevitably end up inhabiting.”
Farrell was immediately taken by the very different role. “The script was beautiful.” At the same time he found it disturbing.
“It was so dynamic and it was so singular and like nothing I’d ever read. I find as an actor, reading things and having a certain degree of choice I’m fortunate enough to have, you either lean into something as you’re reading it or you don’t. … Inevitably I end up leaning into things that I feel I haven’t explored before just because it’s fun. It’s just really fun. It doesn’t take much for me to feel like I’m repeating myself, you know, and that can feel kind of sticky in an unfortunate way. So this was very singular. It was very unique. I’d never read anything like it. I flew through it. But I kind of felt nauseous reading it as well, because the film is, if you ever see it, it’s incredibly loud. The colors are very brash. It’s very bombastic. I mean, there’s nothing subtle about it — I will say that now. And it was the same in reading it. It was kind of an assault on the senses in reading as well.”
“The Ballad of a Small Player” was also the ideal opportunity to work with Berger, who won the 2023 international feature Oscar for “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
Farrell had been familiar with Berger’s previous work, in particular the series “Patrick Melrose” with Benedict Cumberbatch. “I thought that was extraordinary storytelling.”
He and Berger had already early on been in contact about working together.
“Ed and I were talking about doing ‘The Ballad of the Small Player’ before ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ came out. And then it just took off for him, just globally, internationally. He’s been an extraordinary storyteller for years. For decades he’s been working in his chosen field as an artist and writer and director.”
Although a very different genre, Farrell similarly embraced the role of the Penguin in Matt Reeves’ “The Batman,” which led to the hit HBO series. Although he initially didn’t understand Reeves’ take on the character, it all made sense once he saw the Penguin’s look.
Colin Farrell as The Penguin
HBO Max
“I was thinking of Burgess Meredith and I was thinking of Danny DeVito … and that child who sat on the carpet in Dublin at the age of 5 watching ‘Batman’ ’66, and then at the age of 11 or 12 saw Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ with Danny DeVito, and used to draw Batman signals on his jeans. I was like, wow, I’m so excited. The script came, I read it, and I was like, eh? I’ve only got five scenes. I got so greedy. I didn’t really get it, either. That was the shortsighted part.”
“I don’t know, it’s a bit one-note; he’s a bit silly; he’s a bit of a putz. Could this be more interesting? And I was wrong because it was there on the page. I just couldn’t see it. I had some preconceived notion or something that I was looking for, and it wasn’t that.”
He signed on for the role, still not knowing what he would look like. Then Reeves asked him if he’d spoken to Mike Marino, the makeup designer of the Penguin. “And I said, ‘Yeah, we’ve been sending pictures back and forth.’ And he said, ‘Did Mike show you what you’re going to look like?’”
“I’ll never forget, Matt went, ‘Come here, come here, come here.’ And he opened up his laptop and he went, ‘Look!’ It was the first time I saw the makeup … and the cogs crunched.”
Farrell asked if it was CGI. Reeves said, “No, [Marino] said he can make you look like that and nobody’ll notice.”
“I was like, that’s extraordinary. Then the script became clear to me. I could see through Mike Marino’s imagination and every little pockmark and every scar. The character was ferocious looking, but there was also, I could imagine, a sadness to aspects of that character’s life. … It just gave me so much information.”
“Then we did a screen test and it was very weird. It was amazing. But it was very weird. You just give yourself over to it. There was a degree of, let’s say, possession. As close to being overtaken by something as I have ever been was on that. A lot of it was the distance that I was afforded, the seeming distance that I was afforded. It’s very powerful to look at yourself in the mirror and see that looking back at you. It was wild.”
Indeed, Farrell was so overwhelmed with the makeup job that he championed the idea for a Penguin series for the sake of Marino’s work.
About three weeks into the shoot he approached producer Dylan Clark about doing a show. “Mike’s makeup design was so extraordinary and really was very moving; it was very touching to be a part of it. I just felt like I was stepping into the lineage of artists like Dick Smith, who did the original ‘Planet of the Apes’ and did F. Murray Abraham’s makeup, Salieri, on Milos Forman’s ‘Amadeus,’ and won the Oscar for that; Dick Smith, who’s no longer with us; Mike Marino was a pupil of his, kind of an apostle of his; Rick Baker, all these extraordinary artists — Rob Bottin, who did all the makeup in ‘The Thing’ back in the days when makeup was all practical.
“So I felt doing that part, I was like a part of Hollywood history. It was really cool. But there was no plan for it. It was because the makeup was so extraordinary, I thought, this is such a waste to only have five scenes of this, not me, in it. We can do so much with this beautiful makeup that Mike designed.”
As luck would have it, Clark contacted Farrell after the film to discuss the idea for a series they would pitch to HBO.
“And that was it. But we had no idea that it would be received the way it was at all. Truly. No idea.”
