Colin Farrell Talks ‘Ballad Of A Small Player’ & ‘The Penguin’ Season 2

EXCLUSIVE: There’s no getting away from it: Colin Farrell is hot. To be sure, we are seated before a mammoth fire pit, the centrepiece of a swish enclave where well-heeled attendees at the Telluride Film Festival like to stay.

But the heat I’m referring to comes from Farrell’s scorching performance in director Edward Berger’s new film The Ballad of a Small Player, which had its world premiere up here in the mountains in Colorado over the Labor Day weekend.

Farrell is the movie. 

When I ask Berger why he chose Farrell, who starred in HBO Max series The Penguin and will reprise this role in Matt Reeves’ next The Batman movie, his response is simple: “Because he’s f***ing great.” 

Upon hearing that, I laugh because Berger’s comment is a variation of the words that tumbled out of my potty mouth after seeing the picture. My take, if you must know, was: “Oh my Jeezus f***ing Christ, that’s an unbeatable f***ing performance”.

Yeah, I know. Shameful. Wash my mouth out with carbolic soap.

Farrell received  a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin but his work in Berger’s film is absolutely in a league of its own.

The filmmaker thought it would be “really interesting” to “have an Irishman pretend to be a British aristocrat, but was also attracted to his “deep humanity, the vulnerability in his eyes and his willingness to go to the edge.”

The camera adores Farrell’s hazel brown eyes. 

The Ballad of a Small Player is a sizzling cinematic reinvention, thanks to Farrell’s blazingly moving performance, Rowan Joffé’s script, and Berger’s interpretation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2014  novel about a British lawyer, who styles himself as Lord Doyle, on the lam in the gambling jungle of Macau, having relieved clients back in the UK of their supposedly secure funds.

The film is released into select U.S. cinemas October 15, UK and Ireland cinemas October 17, and on Netflix October 29.

I must say here that every department is on a winning streak in this movie, from James Friend’s cinematography to Jonathan Houlding’s garish almost Trumpian production design, Volker Bertelmann’s score, and everything in between.

One feels something close to heartbreak as we observe the desperate tactics the fake nobleman employs to stay one step ahead of utter ruination. He erects a psychological scaffold of rituals to stave off having to confront the fact that he’s reached a dead end. Yet still he refuses to give up his taste for the finer things in life – swanky hotel suites, impeccably tailored suits, lobster and caviar banquets washed down with premium bubbly.

On top of that, he wagers bets at the gambling table where he plays baccarat, which he says someone once called that “slutty, dirty queen of casino card games.” It’s as if Doyle is waging combat against himself. 

Berger and Nina Gold cast Tilda Swinton as Cynthia Blithe, the private investigator who tracks him, laser like, to China, with Fala Chen playing Dao Ming, the savvy hostess who sees something behind Doyle’s desperate tactics, and Alex Jennings as an expat of the most venal variety.

“If it doesn’t touch you as a reader you might as well just walk away”

I ask Farrell what hooked him.

“Well, the script I found was extraordinarily beautiful moving, all those things that you kind of dream of being involved in, things that touch you as a reader,” he says. “If it doesn’t touch you as a reader, you might as well just walk away unless you have to go to work. I speak from someone like everyone who’s here at the festival, every actor, we’re in such a rare privileged position that sometimes we get choice.”

He then removes his cardigan, revealing a black sleeveless T-shirt showcasing biceps the likes of which Jeremy Allen White and Paul Mescal can go whistle for.

The majority of actors, if you get the audition, ”you go to work,” he notes.

“But for me, having the choice that I have sometimes in regard to material I align myself with, what does that mean? It means that I need to feel something. I need to feel it when I read it. That’s all. And I need to feel what, I don’t know? Anger could be enough, sorrow could be enough. Joy: if it’s a comedy. You just need to feel something,” he says passionately.

“So this film was, as you saw, is awash in feeling, like saturated,” he goes on. “Even on the page, even before Edward took his cinematic and altruistic kind of strokes toward the canvas of this film. Even before that, just reading it on the page, Rowan did such a gorgeous job, and Lawrence Osborne wrote a very singular novel. And I knew it was going to be exacting. It was very exacting to read. 

“I was sweating as I was reading the f***ing thing,” he declares.

That  sensibility was brought about, he suggests, because, “I possibly had never read anything that was both as internally and externally chaotic…There was such a lack of fear in it.”

This guy, Lord Doyle, has internal chaos “that was mirrored and represented … by this external world of noise and light and greed and affluence and power and garishness at every turn. There was no escape from the chaos and the madness …and of the deep, deep pain and the kind of deep pain that ultimately results in some form of self-destructive behavior, oftentimes addiction, whether it’s shopping, f***ing, eating, snorting, drinking, whatever it may be. 

“And actually, Baz, like a lot of actors, I’m a whore for a backstory. I love seeing where things came from and going into how and why. There was none of that in this,” Farrell insists.

Lord Doyle is right on the abyss, “and his heels are barely on the cliff’s edge and he’s about to launch,” mulls Farrell.

Farrell saw such a complex character as an appealing opportunity for a thespian. It reminded me of how Sandra Oh’s Dr Cristina Lang, during her reign on Grey’s Anatomy, was only fully sated when she performed a complicated heart surgery.  

“Toes are dangling over the open void and he’s about to launch. And so it was lovely,” Farrell says, licking his lips.

There were versions of Joffé’s script that dug deeper into Doyle’s backstory but the filmmakers decided not to go with it, “and I thought, lovely,” Farrell says.

I nod agreement because Farrell, without saying a word, tells us everything we need to know, even from those everyday rituals I noted earlier. How he goes about getting dressed is like a poem in itself. Something takes hold as if we’re getting transfusions of vital information direct into our bloodstream from him.

“Oh, Jesus,” he laughs. “Our blood is clean. It’s been checked recently. But I was just thinking about what we’re saying about the internal chaos and the external chaos and you talking about him getting ready. That is the only place of order. And I never thought of this before. The only place of order that he has when we meet him is the artifice of presentation. That’s the only order in his life. And I say artifice obviously, because that is not his truth. It is about conning people. It’s about pulling the wool over people’s eyes as we so often do in life… And then there’s this thin veil of order that is his presentation of this Lord Doyle character.”

But even that facade gradually drops away and what he’s left with, Farrell figures, is  “the truth of his sickness and the emptiness that comes when you have taken it to the limit. And the limit is just before death.

“And we don’t always get to choose it.”

Actors don’t enjoy giving too much away about their process, but I push and prod him because a performance of this stature doesn’t just happen. How is this magic achieved? Shaking his head, he says that it does in fact go back to the writing and the structure of the story.

Another point, he allows, “is that I honestly do believe that old thing about, ‘There’s no such thing as small parts, just small actors.’ You know that thing. It’s a very quaint saying, but there’s a truth to it. In my experience, I’ve never applied myself more to a lead role than I have to a supporting role than I have to a cameo. And so you’re always a spoke in this multi-spoked wheel that is the story. And so you lean into that. You lean into the tonality of the piece, which Ed was very clear in establishing both in our conversations together and in the color palettes that I knew he was leaning into, because I went to the production designer’s office and looked at the stills he’d done and some of the designs of some of the scenes. And it was just beautiful. It gave me so much information and so much permission to kind of push the envelope in certain directions as far as Doyle’s behavior went. It was almost like there was a psychological syncopation between the water fountain. The lights coming on, the sound of ding ding, ding ding. The money machine’s counting money. Doyle screams …”

Dual identities

During our conversation Farrell refers to Doyle as Riley, which is his real name. The man’s identities are so screwed up that he’s almost schizophrenic .

“Absolutely,” Farrell agrees. “And all addicts are, and when I was… not to get into that because I’m not giving sound bites… But when I was not living a sober life as I am now, there is a schizophrenic aspect to being an addict of any sort, because you have to hide your behaviors so that they can exist.

“You lie to everyone. And that’s what Riley’s stuck in the middle of. And Doyle is just another lie. And then everything else about the money is just another lie. But lying becomes second nature. It actually, ironically, and sadly becomes this kind of incarcerated truth that you live in. Untruth becomes your reality. And so you don’t know where to turn anymore.”

As we’re on the topic of addiction – and Farrell struggled once upon a time with an addiction to certain narcotics and alcohol but successfully kicked those habits and achieved sobriety in 2008 – I wondered whether he found taking on the role of a man in a crisis of addiction problematic. Was it a role too dangerous to take on, or was he comfortable with it?

“Neither of those,” he answers promptly. “I didn’t think of it as dangerous, which is maybe an arrogance, maybe I should have a greater respect, for I certainly have gratitude for my sobriety, but who knows what’s going to befall any of us at any moment and how we’ll respond to it in life. But I didn’t feel any danger. I didn’t feel any danger at all. 

“What I did feel was terrified. And not because of my own past history with any kind of addictive stuff at all. Really, I can’t say a hundred percent, not that…” he says.

“But for whatever reason, when I read this, it was an opera. It was loud. It is operatic, it felt very honest. 

And there were definitely moments of tenderness amidst the madness, but mostly it was a pretty exacting experience reading the script. So yeah, I knew it was going to be a head f**k to do it.“

His gaze fixes on me as he argues: ”You tell me, people who work on the floor of Wall Street don’t get their heads f***ed. You don’t get your head f***ed with deadlines? I’m not saying it was hardship, or anything like that. It’s a blessing to be able to get your head f***ed by work that means something to you.”

We almost create traps for ourselves in order to get things done, I suggest.

“Somewhere psychologically, you’re doing a dance with yourself,” he says.

Actually, he was never into gambling. “No, no. It was never a suit that I wore, man. Never a suit that I wore, pants didn’t fit, I don’t know. Never got me,” he assures.

How did he get on with baccarat, the slutty queen of card games?

He smiles when he hears the game described in that way. 

“Slutty queen? Slutty queen of the gambling world. She gets around. Yeah, yeah. And always maintains her seat in the throne. Yeah, I would see it. I mean, there would be differences of course if you approached alcoholism or drug addiction, of course.”

Considering the point, he says: “But I think, and this may be way too simplistic, and I hope I don’t insult anyone, but I think that at the root core of all addictions is a similar body of water that contains sorrow, pain, loss, discord, a certain moment in one’s life where the self was too hard to live with. And so you turned away from it in ways that you could cope. So I didn’t really, it wasn’t like, ‘Why is it gambling …?’ And it was kind of nice for me that even though gambling is the main thing, because there was no competing with it, and it was so dramatically resonant. And obviously we were following Lawrence’s book, but he does drink more than is healthy for sure.”

Indeed, the actor consulted with Berger over one particular scene to make the point that Boyle isn’t just addicted to gambling: “It’s everything.”

Perhaps his taste for fine things is an addiction, especially when he’s got no money, and the guy loves to eat.

“The most expensive binge in the history of man,“ Farrell says of Doyle’s gluttony. “I like to binge on Cheetos and Snickers,“ he chuckles. “Lord Doyle likes to binge on lobster tail…”

Did he feel sick after shooting scenes of gorging on piles of food?

“I didn’t feel great after that day. I’m not going to lie. I needed a plunger. I won’t tell you which orifice I f***ing used it on, but no, I didn’t feel great. But it’s all part of the fun and the adventure of it and the challenge of it. And you just throw yourself into it, of course.”

His eyes lit up as he recalled the extraordinary chef at the hotel they took over for the shoot. “She made the most elaborate spread of food outside of a wedding banquet that I’ve ever seen. And it was all for me.

“They had shrimps, they had lobster tails, they had wagyu steak, they had chocolate gateaux, they had macaroons, they had bread rolls, there was champagne, everything. I mean, it was one of those things, honestly, I look and I go, ‘Oh God, this is going to be such a waste.’ I am not going to be able to make it through three percent of this. And I just did quick math and I just said, ‘Okay, I’m going to probably go for this, that and the other, and we’ll see how we go’. “

He praised the veteran camera operator Daniel Bishop for helping to map out how to tackle the mountain of food. 

“I really felt like it was a lovely dance with Danny the whole time. But Danny knew that he had the camera on his shoulder and we just went for it. And we didn’t do too many takes, but it was aggressive.”

Playing the slutty game of baccarat was less painful. It was fun to play and he was aware, as all fans of the James Bond film Casino Royal are, that it was Ian Fleming’s game of choice – handed on by the author to his literary creation.

Farrell calls it a very simple game, adding “that there’s no mental acuity involved or no behavioral tells that can win or lose a game for you like there are in poker or anything like that, where there is theater that’s happening between the players, it’s none of that really. It’s pretty pure chance. But those who play it, particularly the Chinese who invest themselves in the game, they really do believe in the spirit world’s involvement In the game.”

Farrell treasures the time he spent on the film with Swinton. He remembers the first time meeting Swinton in 1998 on the set of The War Zone, Tim Roth’s directorial debut, with Ray Winstone, Lara Belmont, Kate Ashfield and Annabelle Apsion. I covered that film extensively and I very well remember Penny Dyer, the dialogue coach, and unit publicist Annabel Hutton, marking my card regarding a young newcomer by the name of Colin Farrell.

“I think I was 19 or 20 and I had a tiny little role. I played Lara Belmont’s boyfriend in it, in the scene where they go to the beach,” recalls.

He remembers that initial meeting very well. “And she had both her babies with her and she had one on one breast and one on the other. And that was the first time I ever saw Tilda Swinton. And it made perfect sense because the woman is just extraordinary. She’s just, what a spirit. I hadn’t worked with her since. And we’ve crossed paths over the years and it’s really been a dream of mine to work with her,” he says.

“But she was just a joy. Tilda is so incredibly playful. And I just felt like she’s just going off every single word, every twitch, every breath. She’s looking at you, looking at your lips, looking at your eyes. I don’t know that I’ve ever been taken in so much by an actor.

“Every take is different. Certainly the way I work. Every take is different. It should all be within the same psychology and behavior of the character… And she’s the same and I’d be going off her. Every take of hers was different. And I tried to listen pretty well as an actor. So the two of us were just, everything was changing and it was fun. It was really playful, really, really playful. It was wonderful working with her,” he says with warmth in his eyes.

“Tilda just loves being a part of the crew as well. I love working with actors that love being a part of the crew. Not everyone has to. I’m fine with everything. It’s not expected, but she gets in there and gets her hands dirty,” he says admiringly.

Farrell was admiring too, of working with Chen and how she captured “the depth  and sorrow” of her character.

He’ll be on the road promoting Ballad of a Small Player through the fall film festival season and on into awards season, but he has no immediate work lined up “for the first time in ages,” although he will also be out and about in London next week helping to launch A Big Bold Beautiful Journey with Margot Robbie and director Kogonada.

As mentioned earlier, he will play Oz Cobb, stroke the Penguin, in Batman 2 in April of 2026, although he notes that  “I haven’t got much to do on it, just a little bit. I read the script and it’s extraordinary.”

The actor is ambivalent about doing further episodes of The Penguin. “I have no idea if it’s happening. I know that I heard rumblings that they were thinking they’d like to do a second season, but I don’t know if it’s  a good idea. I don’t know the way you go back to the trough… And part of me wants to go, ‘Just let it go people. We got away with it. Leave it as it is.’

 “But, look, if they came up with a fantastic idea or something like that, of course I’d be open to it.”