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Brendan Gleeson has been talking for a while now. “We both talk an awful lot,” he says. “I often feel like, ah, why do I talk so much?” Loud giggles are heard next to him.
“I do the same!” – exclaims Colin Farrell. “Do you do this too? I swear to fucking God, I’m going, won’t somebody just tell me to shut the hell up?’
A request was made to speak to Gleeson and Farrell separately, but the publicist declined. You might ask, who would want such a thing anyway? Think back to In Bruges, the beloved black comedy the actors did in 2008. Playing lovable gunslingers, they were a chemistry lesson, a double act for the ages. And now they’re sitting together in London, Pharrell with a yogic California vibe and expensive-looking motorcycle boots. Gleeson seems to have spent his money in Kos.
They have a new movie to promote. Like In Bruges, The Banshees of Inisherin was written and directed by Martin McDonagh; set on a fictional island off the west coast of Ireland in 1923, Farrell and Gleeson play Padraic and Colm, neighbors and best friends. If this sounds sweet, the meeting turns out to be bittersweet. On screen, a brooding Gleeson soon tells his friend that due to his epic stupidity, he will never speak to him again. The consequences spread throughout the film, one that is both very funny and deeply sad. And the grief is best captured in Farrell’s movie star face, blinking in bewilderment.
Gleeson says he thinks the movie is about how wars start. Farrell agrees. And it might make us think about what friendship means in 2022, the younger man continues. “Because social media gives people access to the idea of friendship. But it also allows us to be irresponsible, which allows the shadow we all have to get into the driver’s seat.
Farrell stands up and breaks the window. On the street below, autograph seekers with glossy photos of him are clustered at the hotel entrance. Martin McDonough is sitting in another room. He gave television interviews. His mood is cheerful. People seem to like the movie, McDonagh says, and he worries about what fans of In Bruges might think. “Because this one goes there with melancholy.”
It really makes you wonder what kind of rum business he’s in, where a story about two middle-aged men feuding in rural Ireland in the 1920s can cause a stir in London’s glitzy hotels. McDonough shines. “I know. But it’s a relief. I thought it might be this little indie thing that 20 Irish people see.”
The tour kicked off at the Venice Film Festival last month, where Pharrell won Best Actor. The weeks after that were about that other currency: celebrity. The approach is twofold, positioning Farrell as an Oscar favorite while also framing him and Gleeson as the lead team. Together they have swept the American talk shows. Like this interview, the focus was on their pairing, two actors who doubled as friends: Farrell, the badass, Gleeson, your ideal father. Today, they are completely honest about the limits of the real world. They’re actually only seen every two years, they say. However, they easily slip into the memories of the meeting in Bruges.
“Friendship takes time, but kinship was instant,” Farrell says. “You often realize that by being the judge, you are also being judged. He had none of that.
“We were very different people,” says Gleason. “But I found in him a general enthusiasm for the world.”
“Although, of course, I wasn’t thinking all that at the time,” says Farrell. “It’s a refit.”
Reality blurs even more. “We’ve always been an odd match,” says Gleeson.
“You see, I think people have been whispering about me my whole life,” Farrell adds. It takes them a second to realize that they are now talking about their characters. They do this a lot, lively and in the first person. You wonder if these might be two men who have grown tired of playing a version of themselves for journalists, closing the ranks with shop talk.
McDonagh is less cynical. “Honestly, they really like talking to each other. They are like that at the film festival parties. Together in the corner, talking about their heroes.
But Colm and Padraic create a terrible vision of male friendship. The male ego and male despair, McDonagh says, are his themes.
The problem with the male psyche, Farrell says, is that it grabs the wrong end of the stick. Men want to be Stoics, but they don’t see what the ancient Stoics really meant. “I think they strive for acceptance of vulnerability. Which is a long way of saying, when I was growing up, my dad told us that emotions were a weakness. He repeats the phrase three times. “Literally. Emotions are a weakness. This is what my siblings and I grew up with. And now here I am laughing and crying for a living, and isn’t that funny?”
Yet men are not the whole story. In the film, Farrell’s heartbroken fool seeks the advice of his bookish and clever sister Siobhan. The actor who plays her is also another story: the understated Kerry Condon, her work as flawless as her co-stars’. “Well, I deserved it,” Condon says of his belated breakthrough. She’s in Los Angeles, conveniently live on Zoom. “I’ve done three of Martin’s plays and spent two years shaving my hair for one of them.”
That play was The Lieutenant of Inishmore, MacDonagh’s account of terrorism and dead cats. Condon was 18 when she first appeared in it, a motivated young actor from County Tipperary. Since then, he and the writer have been friends. She also had a mid-cast role in his last film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. But her career has been mostly in television, a character actor with small, regular gigs on Better Call Saul, Ray Donovan, and more.
McDonagh says he wrote the new role for her. “Partly because I knew Kerry would be brilliant. But also knowing how relatively unseen her brilliance is.”
If the film is a monster success, Condon is game. “I’m not going to lie. I want to provide the money because I am a very independent person. She has plans to open a sanctuary for animals: horses, “old dogs”, possibly goats. She’s also aware that it’s another funny thing to be hailed as a new discovery after so much steady work. “It’s a gas because this week I’m getting an award as ‘one to watch’ in the industry, and that’s nice, but it’s also like, ‘How about you watch all the other stuff I’ve done for the last 24 years?'” But then there’s a part of me that feels like, “Well, maybe I was just warming up.”
She moved to the US to make a living acting, but the Banshees brought her back to Ireland. She was joined by other representatives of the diaspora. McDonough is a Londoner, the son of Irish parents, since they were brought back to Galway, just across from Inishmore, the island for which he named his early play and where they filmed this production. As idyllic as it was, the director found the shoot not without pressure. For all the success of In Bruges and Three Billboards, the film he made in between, Seven Psychopaths, flopped. He still talks about it with a haunted look.
Pharrell, meanwhile, has been in America for half his life. In Banshees, he sticks to his Hollywood topless jogging routine. From time to time she was followed by curious tourists. Condon also felt under pressure, wanting not to think too much about a high-profile job. She and Pharrell rehearsed every morning. If the entire project is filled with gatherings, they go further back than anyone else. In 1999, before even The Lieutenant of Inishmore, she was cast in an episode of the BBC TV program Ballykissangel, the slab sugary Irish role with the fast-rising Farrell. The two were introduced at a final party.
“So that’s when I met Colin Farrell. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.” Condon smiles. It’s taking me a while to catch up. oh! I say. I feel the need to check if I’m following correctly. So you met Colin Farrell and…? “And we had a great time. And then he took a plane to America. They remain friends. In LA, they sometimes walk together. Farrell, she says, is good company, laughing but thoughtful. “What would be the word for him? It evolves.”
Farrell rarely prints interviews anymore. They’re more common on chat shows and the YouTube-like series Hot Ones, where stars talk about killer spicy chicken wings. (This year, Pharrell talked about his childhood crush on Marilyn Monroe through tears and snot.) Shows like these make for safer platforms for an actor with a lively personal history: a sex tape, rehab, a teenage audition for Boyzone. And here, the dual interview with Gleeson makes sense: a layer of protection, the spotlight shared with the burly figure next to him, the family man who only gave up teaching in his mid-30s to become a full-time actor.
Working together again, they couldn’t help but think of the time that had passed since they made In Bruges, their younger selves there on the screen like old photographs come to life. “It is,” says Farrell. “And it’s a lot easier to feel affection for yourself looking back than it is to feel it for yourself now. We could actually have a good talk about it. But Gleeson carefully backs away, and we once again walk around their characters.
Before filming the new film, Pharrell spent the pandemic with his sons, now 19 and 13. He says that in his own parenting, he always looks out for their emotional well-being. “And they’re like, ‘Would you just screw each other?'” But people like us like to talk about our feelings. We don’t have to wax lyrical about every fucking thing, but we try to find a balance.” It circles the mysteries of life, the great conundrum of what it’s all about. “Work is only a means of understanding. Fatherhood too. Art too, though I don’t know much about it.
If the sad first sight of Banshees is just Farrell without Gleason, the film later speaks to an even greater darkness: finding out what other people really think of you. “I’m still reading my reviews,” McDonough admits. “I know I shouldn’t.” For actors, of course, their whole lives require this.
“It’s a mortal fear,” says Farrell. “Public ridicule. I’ve had it at various stages with this and that.”
At home in LA, Condon shrugged. “I don’t need the confirmation. As obsessed as I am with acting, I’m happy hanging out with my animals. So I really don’t care if people like me.
Between now and the Oscars, Farrell will film The Penguin miniseries, which follows his role in last year’s Batman. (For his part, Gleeson was recently cast in the rival Batman sequel Joker: Folie à Deux.) Promoting The Batman, Farrell spoke of feeling liberated from the facial prostheses he wore for the role, liberated that he was no longer visible self. “Of course I was,” he says.
“But I loved the twinkle in Colin’s eye,” says Gleeson. “I thought, there it is!”
Without the makeup, Gleeson says he experienced something similar in an old Irish film, The General, starring real-life gangster Martin Cahill. “I found that terribly liberating. Because playing it, I didn’t care. About everything.” All the things you normally worry about, he says — matters of conscience, the state of the world — can be briefly forgotten.
Pharrell grinned like he’d just heard a great dirty joke. “Shambano brilliant isn’t it?”
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