Colin Farrell

Colin Farrell, who plays Penguin in "The Batman," sat down with "Hot Ones" host Sean Evans for a far-ranging interview covering superhero movies, accents, ...

He may not remember if Al Pacino actually damaged a car that was used in The Recruit, but by the end of the episode he's likely someone you'd be thrilled to sit down and chat with over a pint. Farrell comes off as down-to-Earth and engaged in the show's process. Hot Ones host Sean Evans is very good at what he does, and big credit to the show's crack team of researchers, too.

With 'The Batman' and 'After Yang' now in theaters, we're looking back on Colin Farrell's iconic performances, from indie films to action movies.

Enter 2015's The Lobster, starring Farrell as David, a schlubby man who, after his wife leaves him, is mandated as a single person to go to a hotel for 45 days and if he cannot find a partner in that timeframe, he'll be turned into an animal. For a man who looks like he does, Colin Farrell manages to be quite the shapeshifter, using his symmetrical face and floppy hair to play a cavalcade of sleezes and assholes. Farrell really is a perfect match for the Irish cynicism of Martin McDonagh, and that's perfectly on display in In Bruges. Here, he plays a depressed, misanthropic assassin who accidentally killed a child during a hit, and has been quasi banished to the quaint Brussels town of the title to await more instructions. In his charged-up dealings with Jamie Foxx's "Tubbs" and his speed-boat romance with Gong Li's Isabella, Farrell finds poetry and grace in a part that could have felt like an empty exercise in cool-guy iconography. Colin Farrell's gift is that he's a character actor in the body of an absolute dreamboat, and there's no greater evidence of this than his performance in Steve McQueen's Widows. When he's not coated in prosthetics, like he is playing the Penguin in The Batman, he uses those good looks to his advantage playing slimy creatures like alderman Jack Mulligan. In McQueen's underrated and fascinating heist film, Jack exemplifies a kind of old white Chicago politician with only thinly veiled disdain for the Black people he ostensibly represents. Farrell's observant interpretation finds a father trying to relate to his daughter through the prism of the robot she loves. Farrell lets that come through even when McQueen doesn't focus on his face: In the best scene we hear his dialogue even as the camera stays focused on the outside of his car. In the film he plays Jake, a tea shop owner living in a futuristic city. John Smith is a near-mythic figure in American history, but in Terrence Malick's lyrical depiction of the settlement of Virginia, Colin Farrell lends the reluctant explorer a rugged, rough around the edges characterization that melds well with Malick's mournful and complex version of our country's discovery. When the precogs suddenly predict that one of the program's officers, John Anderton (Cruise), is about to commit a murder, Witwer leads the manhunt for Anderton when the suspect goes into hiding. (It helps that Jack Bauer himself, Kiefer Sutherland, voices the pissed-off sniper.) Schumacher cast Farrell in the Vietnam War drama Tigerland, the actor's breakthrough movie, and the director shows a real understanding of his gifts here, weaponizing Farrell's vanity, charm, and vulnerability to make the audience squirm. That's what he does in Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled as Corporal McBurney, a union soldier who gets treated to the hospitality of a bunch of southern belles when they discover him wounded on the property of their all-girls school.