COLIN FARRELL is a butterfly. This is not an assault on his masculinity—look at him, he’s basically a bottle of Jameson with biceps—but a testament to his transformation. A dozen years ago, he was Colin Farrell: Movie Star. A down-the-middle action stud shooting guns in movies like S.W.A.T. with a side career in lady-slayin’. The Sun actually nicknamed him the Lusty Leprechaun. “That was probably fair,” Farrell admits now.
But at some point—in between fatherhood and sobriety—Farrell got back to acting, something he was always good at, and became the kind of guy who could star in a Malick movie and no one would blink. The kind of guy who could come away from the True Detective tire fire still smelling like an Irish rose. The only downside of Colin Farrell’s rebirth as a character actor trapped in the body of Colin Farrell is that the results are often too grim to show his two sons, ages 6 and 12. “But that’s okay,” he says. “They’re kind of bored by my work. And the more people I have in my life who are not interested in what I do, the better.”