Colin Farrell didn’t need a gambling addiction to understand the pressures weighing on his character in “Ballad of a Small Player.” He just needed the bright lights of Macau.
“It’s like Vegas on steroids,” Farrell says. “The strip is incredibly impressive.”
Built in 2006, the Asian gambling mecca triggers all the senses.
“It’s so elaborate and ostentatious and it’s so bright," he says. "There are fountains, and Celine Dion is pumping through the speakers at all hours of the day. But it feels more family-oriented than Vegas does. There’s not a bunch of strip clubs; there are no people walking around drinking hurricanes out of a straw. They’re very, very focused on gambling.”
The ”new” Macau is in stark contrast to the old one — where history and tradition prosper. In the gambling sector, “your mind could go on flights of fancy and you’d see how the character would see it,” Farrell says.
In Macau for eight weeks, Farrell felt the excesses and pressures his character, Lord Doyle, faces. In vivid colors, director Edward Berger painted an unreal world that is both enticing and addictive. In one scene, Farrell indulges in a lavish buffet of seafood.
“It was a gorgeous spread,” Farrell says. “They had the world’s finest pastry chefs and lobster boilers put out the most extraordinary spread of lobster tails and beautifully cut salmon. I ate it and I was probably 8,000 or 10,000 calories in by lunch. I wasn’t feeling bueno at the end of the day … but it was enjoyable. You read a script and it seems very far from you … ridiculous … and you can’t imagine how a bunch of people are going to play something for real. The next thing, you’re on a set, and there’s probably $1,000 worth of food spread out for you and you just have to massacre it all. Strange job.”
In the film, Farrell has a wardrobe of suits that match the primary colors of the setting; he also wears yellow gloves while he’s at the table, waiting to see if he’s going to regain a lost fortune.
Gambling, the Oscar nominee says, was never a lure in his life. To play the compulsive gambler, however, he looked through the “Rolodex of experience” and found the compulsion, worry, agitation and the “journey of curiosity you have every time you go to work," he says. “This is pretty manic from start to finish and I was fairly raw by the end of it.”
What helps is the collaboration with others.
“I’ve been an actor for 25 years, and I am in no way inured to the magic of working really intensely with a bunch of people in a collaborative fashion," Farrell says. "You don’t always see eye to eye, but it’s an extraordinary thing, whether it’s a film or whether it’s a TV show. It’s all one and the same, really. It’s an amazing, kind of self-galvanizing experience.”
To show other sides of his character, Berger gives Farrell relationships with Tilda Swinton and Fala Chen, women who represent different sides of his decaying life.
Based on the 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne, “Ballad of a Small Player” shows how the lowest of lows and highest of highs hit. It doesn’t detail much of his life outside the tables, but it does show how he handles the pressure, the competition and the complementary addictions.
Recent projects — like “The Penguin” — drew on Farrell’s ability to morph, just as this does. Choosing roles, he says, is a gamble. How they’ll turn out is never a given, particularly at the start.
“Life is a mess,” he admits. As successful as his career has been, “I have no idea how to play the game.”
