Colin Farrell had a great 2022, and rightly so. He deserves every accolade he gets for The Banshees of Inisherin (and any he gets for The Batman, After Yang, and Thirteen Lives as well). Emma Thompson ain’t doing too shabby either. She scored raves last year for Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, as a lonely woman who gets to enjoy the company of a young sex worker. The two happened to share the screen — albeit not in the same scenes, alas — in 2013’s Saving Mr. Banks, about the making of the film Mary Poppins. But in a new chat, it’s clear they have a rapport — so much so that things got a little risqué.
In a new dual interview with Vanity Fair, the two delved into the similarities between their two characters, both people dealing with loneliness. It gets pretty heavy (in a lovely way). But the pair knew to temper the heaviosity with some jokes, even some sauciness. After Farrell talks about how lockdown “imposed an aloneness on people who had never experienced aloneness before,” Thompson suddenly and dramatically shifts gears:
Thompson: Are you having good sex at the moment, Col?
Farrell: What, love?
Thompson: I said, are you having good sex at the moment?
Farrell: Oh, God. That’s a different Zoom, darling. Email me.
It wasn’t the first time they turned the heat up during their chat. When asked about the first time they met each other, Thompson remembered it fondly.
Thompson: I think there were two things before we started shooting. You and I had a dinner together, just the two of us, in a little restaurant and I remember you were looking very-
Farrell: Scruffy?
Thompson: Sexy. You had your shirt undone. I think you had one button undone that was, I felt, going a little far.
At another point, Farrell simply got amusingly frank about his youthful drug period. Thompson mentions first seeing him in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report but can’t remember the name, referring to it as “Scott Frank’s thriller.” (The Queen’s Gambit auteur co-wrote the screenplay.) But when Thompson asked what it was called, he drew a blank:
Farrell: F*ck. I should know that, shouldn’t I?
Thompson: Jesus, you were in the f*cking thing!
Farrell: I blame drugs!
It’s a lovely chat, in which the two ruminate on loneliness and insignificance. “We’re just here for a bit, then we die and we’re gone,” Thompson muses at one point, after she talks about how “unbearable” it was watching Farrell’s sweet nincompoop character in Inisherin systematically stripped of his blissfully stupid happiness.
You can read the full dual interview over at Vanity Fair.
