Colin Farrell stars in After Yang by indie director Kogonada
Colin Farrell is a certifiable A-list actor on a roll but with After Yang he again shows his knack for choosing strong roles in independent films.
Colin Farrell was reading the screenplay for Kogonada’s new film After Yang when he felt an inexplicable tug on his heartstrings.
The Irishman is a certifiable A-list actor – his recent hits include The Batman and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – but he’s also noted for his carefully chosen roles in independent films.
Think of his roles in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, in which he played Nicole Kidman’s husband. His latest venture with South Korean-American filmmaker Kogonada – a rock star in the realm of US indie film – already has made a strong impression with critics.
“As I was reading the script I had to stop halfway through and get a cup of tea, not because I was a blubbering mess, but because I was being stirred inside,” Farrell, 45, recalls.
“Some films are electric guitars, some films are oboes, some films are drum kits or percussion and this film is strings. It’s so gentle, and you know I’m Irish, so I’m a fan of melancholy. I don’t want to insult it or be reductive by calling it melancholy, but it’s the kind of melancholy that is very deep.”
In After Yang, Jake (played by Farrell) and his wife Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith from Queen & Slim) have bought an Asian humanoid robot called Yang (Justin H. Min) as a quasi-son. When Yang malfunctions they desperately try to repair him. Jake, who runs a far from successful tea shop, and Kyra, a high-flying bureaucrat, have been drifting apart and while Yang’s collapse spurs in Jake a mild midlife crisis, it ultimately brings the family together to deal with their loss.
Farrell had been greatly impressed by Kogonada’s 2017 feature debut Columbus, another quietly affecting film about family difficulties and one that was based at least in part on the director’s Asian origins.
“Columbus was filled with emotion, but in a very gentle way,” Farrell says. “It was filled with space and had a kindness, a compassion to it. I feel like Kogonada has that as a man and as a filmmaker, and After Yang has it too.
“He’s so honest and generous and shares with us things that he’s contending with in daily life. He raises questions about what it is to be human.”
Critics have said that After Yang, which premiered at Cannes and then screened at Sundance, is one of the best films ever made about Asian-American identity.
By wearing glasses, Jake can literally view Yang’s memories, his loves and losses, which proves a fascinating conceit.
In our interview I ask Farrell, who has two sons from past relationships, if he worries about the future and whether we might one day have robots as children.
“I’m so concerned with just getting to lunch some days and maybe it’s something I should snap myself out of,” he responds in his usual rapid way of talking. “I’m not thinking of the future too much, but I do ruminate on it.
“I do look at what’s happening in the world around me and the tensions and the frustrations and the aggravations and the lines of division that are ever increasing, and that’s mind-breaking, damaging stuff. The future is worrying regarding what kind of world we are leaving for our children in terms of the natural world and just our relationship to each other. But I’m trying to pull myself back to the present and, as I said, just making it to lunch some days.”
While Farrell admits he finds life heartbreaking, he also finds it beautiful. “I love being alive, I’m a big fan of it, but we often earn the pain that we experience. Sometimes we inflict pain on each other and sometimes people are innocent and don’t deserve the pain.
“I’m watching my boys grow up and when I went past my 12-year-old boy’s school the other day in Studio City, the school where he was in preschool, it destroyed me. I see the loss of innocence all around me – and that’s a part of life. It’s a part of maturation. You have to lose a little bit of innocence and ideally as you get on in life you relocate that innocence or reignite it in a new way.
“I’m just deeply grateful that I could be in this film working with these actors and with Kogonada and the crew. It was an incredibly gentle yet intense and communal experience in telling the story, and I’ll be forever grateful for it.”
Farrell had already achieved recognition in the Irish series Ballykissangel when we first met to discuss his debut in a leading cinematic role in Joel Schumacher’s Tigerland, in 2000. The Irish lad, seated at a table in London’s swanky Dorchester Hotel, admitted he was hung over from the premiere the night before and was scoffing a plate of food as he spoke.
Tigerland, about soldiers training to go to Vietnam, became a break-out hit and Farrell a Hollywood sensation, starring in three 2002 films: Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller Minority Report alongside Tom Cruise; opposite Bruce Willis in Hart’s War; and in Schumacher’s Phone Booth.
He continued to co-star with Hollywood’s best – with Al Pacino in The Recruit (directed by New Zealand’s Roger Donaldson), with Samuel L. Jackson in S.W.A.T., with Angelina Jolie in Oliver Stone’s Alexander, and with Jamie Foxx in Michael Mann’s buddy cop action thriller Miami Vice – while always making time for independent films including the 2003 Irish gem Intermission, with Cillian Murphy.
Along the way his personal life became tabloid fodder, most notably his short-lived, non-legal 2001 Tahitian marriage to Amelia Warner, who is now married to Irish actor Jamie Dornan. In December 2005, realising his life was spiralling out of control as he worked constantly, Farrell took a break, gave up the booze and other substances and checked into rehab. He still does not drink and looks remarkably youthful.
“Yes, I love a cup of tea,” he says. “But I’m certainly not as disciplined and not as committed to the art of tea ceremony and all the philosophy that accompanies it, in the way Jake is in After Yang.”
Farrell is also currently on screens in The Batman, a re-boot of the caped crusader story. With ample padding – he’d already gained weight for the series The North Water and didn’t want to go there again – and prosthetics and make-up, he is unrecognisable as Oswald Cobblepot aka the Penguin. A limited Penguin spin-off series starring Farrell has just been announced by HBO.
Indeed, Farrell is deft at portraying mischievous villains – he also appeared in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – although he plays a softie in After Yang. Would he describe himself as a softie or perhaps an emotionally in-tune kind of New Age man?
His co-star in After Yang, Turner-Smith, says he has a “beautiful, sensitive heart” – but Farrell doesn’t like to categorise himself.
He’s neither a “softie or a hardie” he says, even if he loves playing the latter on screen.
“I’m probably closer to (Batman villain) the Penguin as a human being than I am to Jake,” Farrell says, but then demurs. “I don’t know, I’m just going day to day, Helen, same as us all, trying to figure it out, man, trying to live in this world and not lose my mind.”
Farrell spent a year in Australia at age 17, mostly in Sydney, and says he had “a great time”. He has fond memories of the experience, and of Australians, and welcomed the opportunity to play a Russian thug in Peter Weir’s 2010 prisoner-of-war drama The Way Back.
After Heath Ledger’s death, Farrell together with Johnny Depp and Jude Law replaced the Australian actor for the unfilmed scenes in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
“I didn’t know Heath particularly well, but we really lost one of the truly good ones out there,” Farrell told me at the time. “He was just a wonderful compassionate human being, a genuinely fine actor and was only getting better and better. His work is too good for it not to be seen.”
Farrell returned to Australia last year to star in Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives, based on the real-life dramatic rescue of 12 boys and their coach from a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018.
Farrell played the part of British diver John Volanthen, who is a keen runner. After the shoot had finished, the athletic Farrell, a footballer in his youth, ran in the Brisbane Marathon in a very respectable time.
Thirteen Lives was shot on the Gold Coast and at Springbrook National Park. Farrell says it is a beautiful part of the world.
“I had a great time making the film,” he says. “It was amazing, especially because when we arrived there, we had been just coming off the back of four to five months of pretty strict lockdown here (in Los Angeles). So to go from such a restrained existence to absolute freedom in Australia was beautiful.”
Still, it was unnerving at first. “I went over with my sister and my youngest boy and after we did the two weeks of quarantine, I realised how quickly we’d all become habituated to living indoors and to social distancing and wearing masks. So to go outside and be queueing in a coffee shop with a bunch of people, with no masks and everyone on top of each other, was really quite unnerving for about 24 hours. And then it was, ‘Thank God, this is what it is to be free and to be living again.’ It was wonderful. And I love Australian people. There’s a kind of direct cultural line between my people and the people in Australia that is very easy to discern.”
Thirteen Lives is set to release at the end of the year, as is the Ireland-set story of two friends, The Banshees of Inisherin, in which Farrell re-unites with his In Bruges co-star Brendan Gleeson and writer-director Martin McDonagh.
Yes, Farrell is on a roll again.
After Yang is released in cinemas on Thursday.
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