by Paul Fischer

Colin Farrell may be the hottest young thing to come out of Ireland in years, but the 25-year old Dublin-born actor admits to getting tired of the media labeling him as such. "Fortunately I don't have to live in it all the time," Farrell responds with thick Irish brogue in toe. "But it also gets a bit borin' talking about yourself really; it must be easier to find people who are much more interesting." Colin Farrell was "born and bred" in Castleknock in Dublin and continues to live in the city's Irishtown area where he has a cottage. He describes himself as "the baby of the family", the youngest of four children born to Rita and Eamonn Farrell. His father is a former footballer. Farrell quit school at around 17, or rather school quit him, as he recalls, "School just never held my interest because I always knew, in the back of my head, that I was never going to be an accountant, mathematician or anything to do with academia at all. The only thing I thought I might do was write, but I wasn't any good. I realized I just couldn't take school any more and got thrown out." Farrell began doing odd jobs, first in his father's newsagency, then in a bank and a men's clothing store, before he finally decided to try his hand at acting, despite his very working-class upbringing. "I guess watching films as a kid fueled my interest." At first his dad laughed when Colin divulged his plans. I remember him asking me: 'You want to be an actor? Is that a real way for a man to make a livin'? But he changed his mind when the first paycheck came in." Now dad couldn't be more pleased.

Farrell started out as an actor in Owen McPolin's low-budget Irish feature, Drinking Crude, and his performance caught the attention of an agent, who signed him up. He joined the Gaiety School of Acting in 1996 and dropped out after a year when he got the part of Danny Byrne in the hit Irish TV series Ballykissangel. A performance as a semi-autistic 17-year-old on the London stage caught the attention of Kevin Spacey, who himself was treading the boards in London at the time. Spacey suggested Colin play one of his criminal sidekicks in Ordinary Decent Criminal. But it was his breakthrough performance in Joel Schumacher's Tigerland, a tight, gritty drama set in a Louisiana boot camp in the autumn of 1971 that took Hollywood by surprise - and by storm. Farrell's charismatic, star-making performance as Bozz, the cocky, rebellious soldier took the attention of critics. Farrell's "good looks and charisma speak well for a vital Hollywood career", noted Variety, while Entertainment Weekly commented: "charismatic Irish actor Colin Farrell's anonymous days will be behind him after this".

Farrell found the world première of Tigerland "absolutely nerve-wracking - because I'd never seen myself on a cinema screen before. I was in America, working on the accent, when Ordinary Decent Criminal opened in Ireland. So I was on the phone to the mother and the sisters and they were outside the cinema in Dublin with the mobile phone and the champagne in their hands, telling me they had just seen it." Sustaining his Texan accent was the most difficult thing for him on the set of Tigerland, he says. "Hitting it every now and then was easy enough, but it took a while just keeping it going all the time and getting to the stage where you're not thinking about it one bit, when you can throw it away and you don't hear your voice anymore and you can listen to everybody else. I worked so hard on it. I put everything I had into it."