Colin Farrell has shared the time Tom Cruise ‘wasn’t very happy’ with him while filming the 2002 sci-fi action thriller Minority Report.
He opened up about it in a recent interview
In a Tuesday, October 28 appearance on The Late Night Show With Stephen Colbert, Farrell shared the story of the time Tom Cruise got frustrated with him on set.
Farrell was still struggling with alcoholism and substance abuse at the time, and had partied a little too hard for his birthday the night before he had to work.
He showed up to set hungover
The actor recalled going to set the next day completely hungover. He said, “I had one of the worst days I’ve ever had on a film set.”
“It was my birthday on May 31, and we were shooting.”
Farrell tried not to work on his birthday
“I begged production – who did I think I was? – of a $120 million film if they [could] not have me working on my birthday,” he went on.
“So, of course, my pickup was 6 a.m. on May 31, and I got up to all sorts of nonsense the night before.”
He didn’t get any sleep that night
“I remember getting into bed, and as soon as I turned off the light, the phone rang, and the driver said, ‘It’s 10 past 6.’ I went, ‘Oh, s**t,” Farrell continued.
Then the film’s first assistant director, David H. Venghaus Jr., met him at the shoot and expressed concern that he couldn’t ‘go to the set like this’.
But he thought he could do it
“And I went, ‘Just get me six Pacifico Cervezas and a packet of 20 [Marlboro] Red,’” Farrell went on.
“Now, listen, it’s not cool because two years later I went to rehab, right?” he added after eliciting laughter in the room.
He was then able to walk on set
“But it worked in the moment,” Farrell said. “All the holy people that we look to on how to live a life would say the present is all that counts.”
He was then able to walk on set and proceed with filming his scenes that day after having ‘a couple of beers’.
But he had problems with shooting
Once they were ready to shoot the scenes, Farrell couldn’t remember his lines. “I was terrible,” he recalled.
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“I will never forget the line I had that I couldn’t get out. It was, ‘I’m sure you’ve all grasped the fundamental paradox of pre-crime methodology.’ That was the line that started the scene.”
Crew even asked him if he needed a break
“I remember [the crew] coming up and saying, ‘Do you want to go out and take a breath of fresh air?’ And I remember thinking, ‘If I go out and take a breath of fresh air, then I’ll be under more pressure when I come back in to be better,” Farrell went on.
“And I went, ‘No, we’ll just go through it.’”
Tom Cruise wasn’t happy with him
Farrell also recounted how Cruise got fed up with his inability to perform well at this point in the shooting.
“We did 46 takes,” Farrell revealed. “Tom wasn’t very happy with me. Tom, who I love, was not very happy!”
Farrell eventually went to rehab
The actor eventually checked himself into a rehab center three years after this incident to try to cure an addiction to drugs and alcohol, and then he went back again in 2018 as a ‘preemptive measure’, according to The Guardian.
