Colin Farrell Is Thankful He Still Had Friends After His 'Wild Years'

"I know that people rooted for me," says the Irish actor, who almost lost his whole career

Photo: Nancy Rivera/Splash News

For some reason, in spite of everything, they still liked him.

Colin Farrell went through a wild period in Hollywood from about 2000 until 2006 – he calls them his lost years – and earned a fairly bad reputation along the way. But luckily, the Irish actor wasn’t ostracized entirely, and managed to claw his way back to a respectable career.

“Without any self-aggrandizing, the myth had shown itself to be fallacy,” Farrell, 37, tells the Irish Post of the consequences of his wild-child behavior during that time.

“That said, I’m glad to say I have a bit of goodwill in Hollywood; it might seem a contradiction, but it actually exists. It’s the same in Ireland and other parts of the world: Blood beats throughout hearts, and people experience stuff like hope and faith and gestures of kindness.”

“I know that people rooted for me during those wild years, and that was lovely to discover after the fact.”

His rise and fall, though, were brutal.

Farrell admits his passion and curiosity for acting “got diluted or a little bit toxic due to the amount of success and fame that came my way.” And then his career “came crashing down like a house of cards. It doesn’t make a noise, but you can see the structure is gone. Initially, I was fearful – you know, ‘Jesus, what’s going to happen? The phone isn’t ringing.’ All of that.”

Eight years later, the father of two – James, 10, with model Kim Bordenave, and Henry, 4, with actress Alicja Bachleda-Curus – has returned to his roots in smaller films. And he couldn’t be happier.

“After Miami Vice, some big films went away from me,” he says. “But that was kind of okay because I had other work lined up that provided an opportunity for me to go back to the more simplistic elements of what I was trying to do, which were the elements I fell in love with.”