COLIN Farrell received some of the best reviews of his career when the quirky, Oscar-nominated film The Lobster hit cinemas in 2015.
Now, he's reuniting with the film's director, Yorgos Lanthimos, for the sinister drama The Killing Of A Sacred Deer.
However, the Irish star's next highly anticipated project couldn't be more different: Tim Burton's live action version of Dumbo.
Indeed, if an actor's job is reinvention, Farrell (41) has become a master of the art. He's come a long way from the fresh-faced young thespian who started his career in the BBC TV hit Ballykissangel and enjoyed a break-out hit in the 2002 psychological thriller Phone Booth.
Having already enjoyed a variety of movie roles in the likes of The Recruit, Minority Report, In Bruges, Miami Vice, Total Recall, Fright Night and Horrible Bosses, Farrell is now at the most interesting stage of his film career to date.
Audiences and critics alike were thrilled and delighted when he showed a completely new side of himself as a single man anxious to find his a new life partner lest he be turned into an animal in Yorgos Lanthimos's dark social comedy The Lobster in 2013.
He gained 40lb in weight, embraced his oddity and delivered Lanthimos's distinctive staccato dialogue as if he had never spoken any other way.
Now, Farrell has reunited with the director again for The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, an even darker, more sinister effort than their previous collaboration which Farrell also co-wrote.
The pair's writing and how they work together is kind of seamless in its brilliance – but also in its absurdity.
The very outlandish dynamics that they create are so logical somehow, even though they are also often disturbingly strange and seemingly nonsensical at times.
Indeed, it's almost unbelievable that people would say some of these things to each other in social environments.
"It's not really about making sense or not making sense in Yorgos's world," comments Farrell.
"It's just about taking that leap of faith and immersing yourself in it and accepting the rules which defy convention."
He stars as Dr Steven Murphy, an eminent cardiothoracic surgeon whose family life with wife Anna, played by Nicole Kidman, and their children is thrown into disarray when his past catches up with him in the form of a menacing teenager.
The young man, played by Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk, Love/Hate), forces Farrell's character to make a nearly impossible decision and the role took Farrell to some dark places that lingered with him.
"I knew it would be a bit of a mood changer," he says. "I was a little bit depressed by the end of it.
"I have to say I was ready though because we shot it kind of in chronological order as well, so I knew the whole telling of the story was going to result in obviously what was coming down the road which was this very fateful and very grotesque and garish decision that my character had to make.
"It was a bit icky, even though it's fiction and you're making film, there's crew everywhere, there are certain moments and themes that are so dark if you begin to explore them.
"They can kind of get a bit under your skin, if you're doing it for 12 or 14 hours a day.
"They are hard to get out of your head or your body when you have just been inhabiting a certain mood for a while.
"It's literally for five days a week, for 10 or 12 hours a day. There's not so much time spent in the trailer, waiting for them to set the camera up.
"You're kind of on set all day, which I love. So you're close to inhabiting that mood, that mentality, throughout most of the day, five days a week, so by the end of it I was a bit funky."
But fearlessness is something Farrell has always embraced as an actor, accepting new challenges and changing direction when something piques his interest.
"A certain amount of fear is OK," he says. "But it's how you let that fear inform the decisions you make.
"If you turn away from something because it strikes a fear in you, I suppose you should ask yourself what that fear is about, and if you can kind of get to the origin of it, then maybe it is a reason to continue down that path and pursue it and understand that fear more.
"We're all, to greater or lesser degrees, having a shared experience on this planet. I know people are very different and each person's individual experience and how they carry themselves to the world and how they allow the world to inform them and how they inform the people around them is different, but we do share so many things.
"So if you have a fear, it's good to look at it, and question it, and I was certainly fearful going into this, and I think I have a certain amount of fear in every job.
"But then if the fear becomes a constriction, if it becomes something that makes you turn away from something, or something that kind of casts attention on you, then that can be not conducive to the freedom that one should have in creating characters and being part of telling a story."
Farrell's career will take another turn when he appears in Tim Burton's live action adaptation of Dumbo.
"We're shooting it still, we have about two weeks left, I'm ready now to get home.
"It's been beautiful to shoot, it's been so much fun to arrive on set every day and see these extraordinary sets.
"Just the world that the film takes place in, I think will be one of the most beautiful and bewitching and dream-like worlds that I have ever been part of.
"And it feels very sweet to me: it's not twisted, or dark in any way. It feels very sweet and feels very buoyant and Tim is gorgeous to work for, and work with, he really is. He's a beaut.
"It's a long time before it comes about because there's a lot of little things to do, and flying elephants to create and such but it's a beautiful story.
"I think he's making a beautiful film and I've had a blast on it, so we'll see down the road."
:: The Killing Of A Sacred Deer is in cinemas now
