Two iconic Irish actors, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, made some noise earlier this year with the dark comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, which was met with critical acclaim. The film concerns two longtime friends, Padraic (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson), living on the fictional island of Inisherin in the 1920s. Colm suddenly wants to cut off their friendship, much to Padraic’s dismay, who pushes his friend to find out why he would do such a thing. The duo has explosive chemistry here, and they talked with Variety about how they came to meet. Gleeson reflects on how they found common ground during their first encounter:

Farrell similarly recalls their first meeting, although he admits he was a little nervous:

“I met him in the Chelsea Hotel a year or two before ‘In Bruges’ because I was trying to get a movie made, an adaptation of a Flann O’Brien book. It’s kind of a crazy movie so I met him wondering, ‘Would you be interested in becoming involved in it?’ And he was incredibly up for it. And we just connected in a kind of a very odd way. You just find there’s a kind of commonality in the way we both approached the work. In other ways, we were different. I remember him telling me that he’d been living for seven years in hotels. I don’t understand how you do that. His schedule had been that relentless. I said, “Geez, I’m not sure I could live like that.”

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The pair’s first project was In Bruges, another dark comedy written and directed by Martin McDonagh, who did the same for The Banshees of Inisherin. It also pitted Farrell and Gleeson in a strained friendship and earned a cult following after its release in 2008.

“He’s the elder statesman for fellas of my ilk at home, an incredible representation of the potential of our culture to reach a global stage and to be moved by art. So I was a little bit nervous! But nervousness just means you care. But within 30 seconds the nerves were gone. And I was only sober like a week or two when we met and I think he knew that because he had a couple of bottles of water. It would have been a very different meeting if it had been a year before! But from the get go, it was easy.”

Gleeson Reveals Why it Took So Long to Reunite with Farrell

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When two actors hit it off with fantastic chemistry on screen, they often get paired up in more films shortly after. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with Farrell and Gleeson, although it certainly wasn’t because they disliked each other. Gleeson reveals that director Martin McDonagh wanted to take some to pair them up again:

In other words, they didn’t want to rush another Farrell-Gleeson duo movie just for the sake of it. It was well worth the fourteen-year-wait, though, with Farrell calling Banshees ‘an ever-living, organic thing’ and Gleeson referring to it as ‘bold’:

“Ultimately, he didn’t want the three us to come together and blow it. He ultimately has to write this stuff. He had a version of it seven years ago and he wasn’t happy with it.”

Brendan Gleeson recently joined the cast of Joker 2, which will release in 2024, while Colin Farrell is reprising his role as The Penguin in an HBO Max spinoff series to The Batman.

“It’s so bold. He makes these bold choices. He took a friendship and he deliberately disrupted it. He throws all the cards in the air in his writing. He’s told me before he likes to put a roadblock in the way. He gives himself a situation that is almost completely impossible.”

The Banshees of Inisherin premiered on October 21st, 2022, and was directed and written by Martin McDonagh. Along with Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, the cast includes Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon. It was distributed by Searchlight Pictures and is currently streaming on HBO Max.