Colin Farrell

Now on Showtime, "After Yang" is a sci-fi drama that stars Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Justin H. Min, Haley Lu Richardson, Clifton Collins Jr., ...

The poetry in these scenes is bolstered by a tender piano score and a color palette of hazy golds and teals. In short, After Yang is a great movie. Min brings a radiance to Yang that makes him shine even in snippets of memory. So, while I sat and watched Jake and his family gently grapple with mourning, I was able to admire the artistry of the cast and its creator. While Jake seeks to get Yang repaired, his journey takes him into a deeper understanding of this world and of the son he is destined to lose. And so a machine teaches a man how to be human. The ensemble's performances are in sync with the muted aesthetic, made up of longing looks and hushed tones. A sci-fi film in content but not spectacle, After Yang weaves into its world not only androids that look indecipherable from people, but also clones, conspiracy theorists, and a mapping of consciousness. Today, you could go to theaters for a DIY double-feature that nicely encapsulates the range of Colin Farrell. All you need do is pair The Batman — in which a barely recognizable yet nonetheless riveting Farrell plays the dastardly Penguin — with After Yang, in which the Irish actor plays a father rocked by ennui and grief. But rather than focus on the hurt and rage that comes with grief, Kogonada explores a quieter kind of reflection. In the former, you see the alluring mischief that made Farrell a sought-after bad boy/hunk in the 2000s. But when Yang abruptly powers down, they realize how much they relied on him as a part of their family.

Out in theaters and on Showtime March 4, the warm, unassuming film centers on a family whose resident “technobeing,” Yang—a companion for their adopted ...

Do you have any favorite teas?Farrell: I really enjoyed the oolong teas I had when I was in New York. Kogonada was kind enough to furnish me with a day spent with the owner of the Brooklyn tea shop we shot in, and we did a tea ceremony, and it was slow and patient and deliberate and fucking quiet and so beautiful. I’m the result of choices my parents made, and I understand their history more now, but it’s always going to be a part of what I’m wrestling with.“When I read the script, I got this sense that there was going to be nowhere to hide if we were going to tell this story honestly,” Farrell says. Both of my boys are adopted from Korea, and the minute I first saw my sons, I can’t explain it—I thought there would be some little obstacle, but, God, they just felt like my kids in a way that was so existential. Having seen Columbus, having felt how thoughtful and quiet and deliberate a filmmaker Kogonada is, I felt that After Yang was going to be an experience that was going to be an exposé of us all, as people and as actors. How was it to dial it back?Farrell: When I read the script, I got this sense that there was going to be nowhere to hide if we were going to tell this story honestly. So this film was about trying to navigate this construct of Asian-ness and trying to understand where I belong. We grabbed any opportunity to integrate plants, so that’s why there are plants in the tunnels and cars—there was a real desire for it to be like a city in a forest. My choreographer [Celia Rowlson-Hall] put it in the most lovely way, that this was like a pop of confetti at the beginning of the film, and everything else was like the confetti falling down to the ground.Colin Farrell: It was just really fun. It’s almost a judo-like feeling.Kogonada, you’ve talked about how the short story that the film is based on made you reflect on your Asian American identity and Asian-ness as a construct.Kogonada: I was in Korea last year, and I just thought, God, I struggle so much with feeling like I belong anywhere. And at the time, it was gutted, so we got to design it from scratch. And because so much of the movie happens in the home, there had to be something open and interesting about that architectural dynamic. And there’s a fascination with architecture that was also evident in Columbus.Kogonada: Production designer Alexandra Schaller and I discussed the future we wanted to put on screen.

Kogonada's After Yang follows a couple, played by Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith, who go to great lengths to repair Yang, their 'techno-sapien' ...

Kogonada: To go back to your first question, it’s that there is something loving about this family in their relationship to the world of this future. I don’t think this family has that, and the tension driving them is to still care, to still try. We’re not close enough to that brink now – there’s still space for fundamental disagreement, like on global warming for instance – but in the film it’s a world that got very, very close to the end and humanity had to come together as a global community to reassess its relationship with nature and revert to a more organic way of existing. The world today is scary, so here is this family nucleus that is represented in a much more gentle way. How much a conversation was there between you two as to what the world outside this family unit looked liked? Kogonada: That’s so interesting because I wanted to think about the dynamic of the family versus the outside world.

The second feature from director Kogonada, After Yang, explores grief and memory in a sci-fi setting.

After Yang is both unsatisfying and cathartic at the same time, providing a poignant payoff to a story that leaves the viewer reaching out for more understanding. After Yang may actually be too suggestive sometimes, depriving us of some sort of context for this world and the events taking place in it. As Jake begins to realize Yang may be the glue holding his family together, and thereby just how incalculable his loss could be, he also discovers that Yang seemingly harbored an inner life and memories of his own.

With 'The Batman' and 'After Yang' now in theaters, we're looking back on Colin Farrell's iconic performances, from indie films to action movies.

Enter 2015's The Lobster, starring Farrell as David, a schlubby man who, after his wife leaves him, is mandated as a single person to go to a hotel for 45 days and if he cannot find a partner in that timeframe, he'll be turned into an animal. For a man who looks like he does, Colin Farrell manages to be quite the shapeshifter, using his symmetrical face and floppy hair to play a cavalcade of sleezes and assholes. Farrell really is a perfect match for the Irish cynicism of Martin McDonagh, and that's perfectly on display in In Bruges. Here, he plays a depressed, misanthropic assassin who accidentally killed a child during a hit, and has been quasi banished to the quaint Brussels town of the title to await more instructions. In his charged-up dealings with Jamie Foxx's "Tubbs" and his speed-boat romance with Gong Li's Isabella, Farrell finds poetry and grace in a part that could have felt like an empty exercise in cool-guy iconography. Colin Farrell's gift is that he's a character actor in the body of an absolute dreamboat, and there's no greater evidence of this than his performance in Steve McQueen's Widows. When he's not coated in prosthetics, like he is playing the Penguin in The Batman, he uses those good looks to his advantage playing slimy creatures like alderman Jack Mulligan. In McQueen's underrated and fascinating heist film, Jack exemplifies a kind of old white Chicago politician with only thinly veiled disdain for the Black people he ostensibly represents. Farrell's observant interpretation finds a father trying to relate to his daughter through the prism of the robot she loves. Farrell lets that come through even when McQueen doesn't focus on his face: In the best scene we hear his dialogue even as the camera stays focused on the outside of his car. In the film he plays Jake, a tea shop owner living in a futuristic city. John Smith is a near-mythic figure in American history, but in Terrence Malick's lyrical depiction of the settlement of Virginia, Colin Farrell lends the reluctant explorer a rugged, rough around the edges characterization that melds well with Malick's mournful and complex version of our country's discovery. When the precogs suddenly predict that one of the program's officers, John Anderton (Cruise), is about to commit a murder, Witwer leads the manhunt for Anderton when the suspect goes into hiding. (It helps that Jack Bauer himself, Kiefer Sutherland, voices the pissed-off sniper.) Schumacher cast Farrell in the Vietnam War drama Tigerland, the actor's breakthrough movie, and the director shows a real understanding of his gifts here, weaponizing Farrell's vanity, charm, and vulnerability to make the audience squirm. That's what he does in Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled as Corporal McBurney, a union soldier who gets treated to the hospitality of a bunch of southern belles when they discover him wounded on the property of their all-girls school.

Colin Farrell is back in a big way. He appears in two movies released on Friday, "The Batman" and "After Yang."

Privacy CenterIf you turn this off, you will not receive personalized ads, but you will still receive ads. WarnerMedia uses data to improve and analyze its functionality and to tailor products, services, ads, and offers to your interests. Colin Farrell attends "The Batman" film premiere in New York on March 1, 2022.