FOR MUCH OF his career, Colin Farrell had that well-known, bad boy persona that helped him breeze through Hollywood, partying with all the biggest A-list names and he even had a brief relationship with Britney Spears.

It feels like a lifetime ago. The Colin we know today is a doting father who doesn’t go anywhere near the booze anymore. He seems far better equipped to sense the pressure and step out of the limelight to spend time with his family when it’s necessary, and has just returned from an almost year-long break. 

On last night’s episode of The Late Late Show, Colin admitted that it wasn’t fatherhood that changed him. 

People say having a kid changes you. No it doesn’t! Look around the world – there are so many people it doesn’t change. But it should change you. Change can’t be inflicted on a person. It has to be invited. To have change in your life, lasting change, affective change, positive – you have to be open to it. For the first two years of James’ life… I wasn’t open to change. I thought all my son needed was a 26-year-old pisshead best friend. 

Colin said that, “No matter how locked I was, I was aware of the gravity of bringing a child into the world,” and yet, it took two years for him to accept that he was not fulfilling his responsibilities as a father. 

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It wasn’t until Colin’s first son was six weeks old that the actor finally met him. 

I was in Morocco doing Alexander, and the doctor said he could fly at six weeks, so his mother flew over to Marrakesh and I met him on a runway. I’ll never forget the moment she opened the shawl and I saw him for the first time and it was the most powerful thing I have ever experienced.

At this stage, Colin gets a little bit choked up. Holding back tears, he said:

I always thought that the power I felt when I saw him was love, and of course love was in there, but I realised recently – it hit me like a steam train – I wasn’t in any condition at the time to take care of another human being. I think that’s what some of the tears were as well.

 At another stage in the interview, Ryan Tubridy asked Colin what he thought the lowest point of his career was.

Colin said that it was actually part of the experience of filming Alexander in Morocco, during the period in which his first son was born. 

It’s funny, honestly – one of the highlights [of my career] was shooting Alexander and one of the lowlights was how it turned out. If I knew how the film was gonna be received, commercially and critically, the way it was slaughtered in both arenas… I would still do it, which might sound foolish. But the experience I had with the crew and the cast and all the Irish actors…

Farrell then went on to describe how Oliver Stone, the director of Alexander, was in awe of the talent in Ireland when he came here to cast for the film – so he decided to hire as many Irish people as he possibly could for the film. This was part of the reason why critics were unimpressed with the movie – they didn’t think it was realistic to see Irish people cast as Macedonians, while using their native accents. Colin’s still pissed off about this after all these years:

Some reviewers didn’t like that, but to be honest, if you’re going to do a film like that… Unless you’re speaking the ancient archaic language that is relevant to that time – it doesn’t matter if you’re speaking in received pronunciation or mid-Atlantic or whatever else. So Irish was as valid. And actually, there’s an Oxford scholar called Robin Lane Fox who said that if there was an English language sound that was close to Macedonian, in his mind it would have been the Irish dialect, the Scottish dialect. I think by accident, Oliver was correct. 

Colin also admitted that the bad reviews really got to him after the film was released, and said people forget “you’re a human being.”

 In a lighter segment of Colin’s interview, the 42-year-old looked back on his very, very, very brief stint with Boyzone, after Louis Walsh scouted him in The Pod wearing a rubber t-shirt. 

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