Colin Farrell’s outrageous Netflix film ‘wrecked’ him daily with most intense role yet

Colin Farrell’s newest film Ballad of a Small Player sees him give a frantic, exhausting and perhaps even career-best performance which left him ‘wrecked’ at the end of every day.

The Irish Oscar nominee, 49, plays a flamboyant but desperate expat, drowning in debt in the casinos of Macao in Netflix’s latest psychological thriller, directed by Conclave filmmaker Edward Berger and co-starring Tilda Swinton, Fala Chen and Alex Jennings.

It looks like the type of performance that took everything out of him and is stressful even to watch.

‘You don’t want to talk about it being hard because I live in the world, I see how hard it is – I know, I’ve seen my pay cheque, all that stuff,’ Farrell begins, carefully, to Metro. ‘Having said all that, if you give yourself over to the script as you should, and to the situations, I was pretty raw by the end of it,’ he revealed of the challenge of playing such a chaotic character as Lord Doyle.

For a film that makes use of plenty of close-ups on Farrell, heightening the tension, he jokes that he and camera operator Danny Bishop ‘could have been tied at the hip with 18 inches of thread and we wouldn’t have broken it’.

‘I mean, he was here for so much of the film,’ the star laughs, gesturing at his face, ‘and his wife said by the end of every day when he came home, he was exhausted because it was all so frenetic.’

He describes Ballad of a Small Player as ‘chaotic from the first frame’.

‘The speed of it was a reflection of the internal implosion that the character is going through. So with that in mind, yeah, I was wrecked by the end of every day – but, utterly fulfilled. That’s the thing, you know, you give yourself over fully, and it just gives back to you.’

How the ‘maximalist’ movie took its toll

Berger agrees that the shoot was an ‘intense experience’ as he sought to make a ‘maximalist’ film; it’s excessive and quite outrageous in many ways.

‘I’m usually, like, a minimalist person. This was not! I felt I wanted to go there and make a maximalist film, really use everything at our disposal – acting, camera, pans, music – to make you feel what this character is feeling. Because from the beginning, underneath, there’s this tension and we wanted to put that on the screen,’ he explains.

He admits he did panic that, after this, his collaborators like Bishop would decline to work with him on his next film.

‘All the crew, they were all battered by the end of it,’ adds Farrell.

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But for Berger, Farrell was leading from the front with his commitment to Ballad of a Small Player.

‘The entire crew – I’ve never experienced it – but the entire crew basically snapped to attention when Colin stepped on set,’ he reveals. ‘This is not out of fear or respect – it is respect – but it’s mostly seeing how good he is and wanting to be as good and giving as much as he gives.’

A lot of this comes from Farrell’s intense emotional preparation with the script ahead of filming, drawing ‘what you observe from the world around you’ into it – even if the practical preparation was less strenuous.

‘I played a couple of hands of baccarat, but I don’t know how much that helped,’ he smiles of his hapless gambler character, before giving fascinating insight into exactly how he approaches a script as an actor.

How Colin Farrell tackled his chaotic character as an actor

‘You spend a lot of time thinking about it, visualising it and trying to figure out what it means to you and what it might mean to that character, until the ‘you’ fades away and the character becomes more pronounced. You read a script, and you read it objectively, until you read it more and more, and then you become a subject to it. That’s the ideal journey, I suppose.’

That whole-hearted dedication to a story is what gets the type of performance Farrell really wows with in Ballad of a Small Player, which is an adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel.

While Farrell bought the book before making the film, he ultimately decided not to read it having already connected with the script as written by Rowan Joffé – ‘I just didn’t need to shake the apple cart in this way’.

Berger has already directed Oscar-nominated adaptations with Conclave and All Quiet on the Western Front, so he’s quite the master at interpreting the works of others, although it’s a description he modestly rejects.

‘A book is always a great basis; I feel that someone has put a lot of thought into it before us. There’s someone who’s done intellectual work, has thought about it, lived it, and we can get inspired from it. We can mine from it and our screenplay benefits from it, our movie benefits from it. And we can breathe another life into it.’

I was wrecked by the end of every day – but utterly fulfilled

Ballad of a Small Player wears a lot of its authenticity on screen, as it was filmed in some of Macau’s real-life top hotels and casinos. But filming in the biggest suites – ‘we want to show the luxury that [Doyle] treats himself to and those suites you can’t buy’ – came with its own set of problems.

‘They’re free if you lose millions,’ Farrell shares, with Berger revealing: ‘So you’re basically thrown out if someone comes in who wants to lose HK$20million (£1.9m) overnight!’

It often disrupted the shoot. ‘We kind of knew, “Oh damn, we can’t shoot there tomorrow. Why don’t we switch the schedule the around?” Berger remembers that getting turfed out could have happened ‘at any moment’. Just to add an extra layer of real-life stress to the shoot.

Ballad of a Small Player’s most shocking scene

One of the most memorable scenes in the film sees Farrell as Doyle put himself under immense strain gorging on lobster and chocolate cake – with unpleasant consequences. It’s both repulsive and impressive.

‘I skipped breakfast that day, and had had about 10,000 calories by lunch,’ the actor shares of the ‘madness’ on set that day.

But he also ended up unexpectedly inspiring Berger to change part of the movie with his preparation for the scene.

‘We’re shooting in this suite, and I constantly heard music. Funnily enough, the music fit the scene – it was a great soundtrack. And I kept wondering, who the hell is playing this? I mean, it’s great, but I’d rather like to put it in afterwards and not be disturbed – until I realised it’s him listening to it on his headphones, getting himself into the mood!’

Farrell’s choice of a Bach organ piece went on to soundtrack the scene for audiences too.

‘It just goes to show that we were utterly in tune by that time on the type of film [we were making],’ adds Berger.

Farrell was careful never to judge Doyle although he struggles to come up with elements of the character that he liked.

‘Oh I don’t know, he wore a nice pair of pants,’ he offers, of Doyle’s eye-catching wardrobe, which includes a green velvet jacket and mustard leather gloves.

But while Farrell lists his negative attributes – ‘he’s incredibly deceptive and untrue and deceitful’ – he still saw his being lost as ‘a virtue’.

‘The fact that he is as lost and as pathetic and as tragic, almost, as he is, was something that I found quite moving,’ he shares.

‘The level of his misguided way of being I found both appalling and also at the same time, most attractive, because I knew it gave ample opportunity for a certain amount of growth.’

But to say more would be to spoil the wild and unexpected experience of Ballad of a Small Player.

Ballad of a Small Player is streaming exclusively on Netflix from today.

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