Rise & fall of an underdog

Hollywood diaries

For their bouts of chemical addiction, Hollywood’s A-list stars have any number of glitzy rehab options. But when it’s a slump in their bankability that needs addressing, there’s a new place to check in: a season-long stint in the ensemble of HBO’s dark-nights-of-the-soul police drama, True Detective.

The first series did wonders for the respectability of Matthew McConaughey, at exactly the same moment that he was reaping plaudits (and an eventual Oscar) for his role as an AIDS sufferer in Dallas Buyers Club.

Colin Farrell — along with co-stars Vince Vaughn, Taylor Kitsch and Rachel McAdams — is now hoping for a little of that gritty stardust to rub off. The Irishman’s role as seen-it-all cop Ray Velcoro, living on a razor-edge in the fictional Californian city of Vinci, feels like a fast-track to awards attention: a Golden Globe nomination is practically a given. Farrell has had a bumpy, continually promising, occasionally catastrophic career as a leading man; it’s all too easy to forget his gifts. True Detective, though, is just the latest reason to take him seriously again.

Farrell’s emergence 15 years ago was one of those fast-track success stories to turn many a struggling 20something in Hollywood green with envy. Director Joel Schumacher, it’s said, spotted him in the role of Kevin Spacey’s sidekick, in the little-seen Irish crime comedy Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000). He was groomed right away to play the lead as a rebellious draftee in Schumacher’s Vietnam drama Tigerland (2000) — the kind of strut-your-stuff showreel money couldn’t buy a virtual novice.

Seemingly overnight, Farrell was deluged with major studio offers, and the hit-and-miss pattern of his career choices started to take shape. Supporting Tom Cruise as a slick, new-kid-on-the-block justice agent in Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) — the part was offered to Matt Damon first — was a cannier move than replacing Edward Norton in the dud PoW drama Hart’s War (2002). Returning for Schumacher in the single-location thriller Phone Booth (2002) proved he could open a film solo while kicking up an energetic flop-sweat; his dull-as-ditchwater role opposite Pacino in The Recruit (2003), though, was a step back to anonymity.

So it has continued. You can’t trust a script on the basis of Farrell starring in it. But then he’ll walk into something like Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges (2008) — up to this year, the performance of his career — and win a Golden Globe, for being a perfect scumbag and little-boy-lost, and milking more opportunities for scallywag comedy than a lifetime of studio paycheques might provide.

When Farrell’s on, he’s on. There’s something nervy and whispered about his acting, a combination of squint and bluster under those famous brows, that makes him feel like a hard-boiled star — a little like John Garfield, brooding working-class rebel of the Forties.

Farrell specifically studied Garfield to play a struggling Depression-era writer in Ask the Dust (2006) — alas, one of his more ill-fated attempts to break out of routine typecasting as cops or criminals, but the effort’s worth noting. His quietest, least antsy performance ever, as the explorer John Smith in Terrence Malick’s heart-melting settlement epic The New World, is one of his most affecting.

But then there’s Tabloid Farrell. His off-screen reputation as an Oliver Reed-style hellraiser — and star of a notorious sex tape, which was leaked in 2006 — has given him an aura of danger, but also unreliability. “There was an energy that was created,” he said to the Telegraph in 2010, “a character that was created, that no doubt benefited me. And then there was a stage where it all began to crumble around me.”

The costliest débâcle — the millstone of Farrell’s career, for years — was Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004). Front and centre in this out-of-control epic, squaring up to elephants with a questionable blond haircut, he couldn’t escape the flak and caught a heap of it, straight in the face.

There was a risk-taking element to the role — the unembarrassed bisexuality, for starters — that made it a higher-stakes failure than, say, your average superhero movie. Where many stars would lick their wounds after such a fiasco, Farrell took less than a year to get sucked into another chaotic maelstrom, the storm-battered set of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006). He’s talked about losing his mind on that one, not even knowing where he was on a given day. Substances were certainly involved, and a stint in rehab soon followed.

By all accounts, Farrell is back on the straight and narrow, and he’s still a star name the studios will call up for something like the expensive sci-fi remake Total Recall (2012). So why’s he having to check in for the True Detective treatment? Because Total Recall was horrendous, and he wasn’t much good in it.

Supposed prestige picks, like Neil Jordan’s sodden mermaid fable Ondine (2009) or Peter Weir’s sadly underpowered Gulag escape drama The Way Back (2010), didn’t pan out. He got worse reviews as PL Travers’s drunkard dad for Saving Mr Banks (2013) than anyone else, and for a reason.

But Farrell’s waywardness, in a way, is what makes him a diamond in the rough, never worth discarding. He was irresistibly funny, predatory, and filthy as the vampire villain in Fright Night (2011) — one of those In Bruges cases of a role feeling like a sly reinvention and commentary on himself.

Meanwhile, his handlebar mustache and extra bulk as True Detective’s Ray Velcoro shows us a newly middle-aged Farrell, with a whole army of demons dancing before his eyes — it feels like therapy. And in Yorgos Lanthimos’s daring dystopian satire The Lobster, which premiered in Cannes, there’s even more of him, wheezing behind a hefty gut as he plays the weirdest dating game seen on screen for years.

If it’s tempting to call an actor’s mistakes character-building, Farrell’s are all but defining. And the more of them he makes, by some fluky paradox we’ve only just discovered, the better he gets.