With the Academy Awards slowly approaching, many feel it could be actor Colin Farrell’s time for his work in The Banshee of Inisherin. But before his latest project, Farrell thought another movie would lead him towards Oscar glory.
Colin Farrell once starred in the 2004 flop ‘Alexander’
Farrell once teamed up with critically acclaimed director Oliver Stone to deliver Alexander to theaters. The feature was a cinematic take on the life of conqueror Alexander the Great, with Farrell as the titular character. At the time of his casting, Farrell was impressed by the script and looked forward to working alongside the filmmaker.
“The chance to work with Oliver was the most attractive thing about it,” Farrell once told MovieWeb. “And then a close second was how fantastic a script he wrote. Then, a very close third or maybe joint second was the part itself. It was just an amazing, amazing part and amazing character. And I knew it would be an absolute trip.”
But Alexander didn’t turn out the way Farrell expected it to.
Colin Farrell expected to win Oscars for ‘Alexander’
Alexander didn’t fair too well at the box office or critically. Many considered the movie to be a flop after its initial run in theaters, a sentiment that Farrell agreed with. The Batman star was so hurt by the movie’s performance that he nearly abandoned the film industry because of it.
“That was tough. I say tough relative to a charmed life, but I’m not going to apologise for how much it affected me emotionally and psychologically,” Farrell once said according to Yahoo. “I was going to walk away from acting. I couldn’t even buy a packet of cigarettes without feeling like I needed to say sorry to the guy behind the counter just in case he happened to see the thing.”
Perhaps the disappointment might have even been worse for him because of the lofty expectations of the film’s future. Which included Oscar nominations.
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“We were splitting the atom on Alexander – we were really doing something that had never been done and we were telling an epic tale that would harp back to the days of Cecil B. Demille and we were going to get 12 Oscar nominations. In our heads. That’s one case of where we completely misjudged the situation,” Farrell once opened up to Total Film (via Contact Music).
But he felt the fate of Alexander was fitting for the conqueror the film was based on.
“It was a very big story and I know that Oliver was very rushed to do a cut, but for me it just failed gloriously. It just kept in step with the magnitude of Alexander’s ambition and ego,” he added.
Colin Farrell thought he was a ‘crap actor’ after doing ‘Alexander’
Alexander was such a huge blow to the actor’s confidence that he found himself retreating for a while. The actor didn’t even want to be seen or recognized at the time, and he took precautions to ensure he wouldn’t be.
“So I went to Lake Tahoe to a ski resort,” he said in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I didn’t ski, but I realized I could wear a mask and a beanie, and I did that for three days. And then after that, yeah, I did question. I went, ‘I’m just s**** at it. I’m a crap actor. I’ve been found out.’”
Eventually, however, Farrell would bounce back. So much so that now he finds himself in a movie generating the kind of buzz he imagined Alexander would. So far, The Banshee of Inisherin has been nominated for a few awards and has received overwhelmingly positive reviews. The film’s track record on the awards circuit might indicate an Oscar nomination in the very near future.
