Colin Farrell gave a lesson in cool at Tuesday’s 80th annual Golden Globe Awards when he heaped praise on presenter Ana de Armas for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde — after taking the stage to accept his own Golden Globe for The Banshees of Inisherin.
“I thought you were extraordinary,” he told de Armas, before accepting the award for best actor in a musical or comedy. “I cried myself to sleep the night I saw your film. … It messed me up so bad.”
He said he was especially moved by a short scene showing Monroe’s ankles at the edge of the bed. When a few people in the audience laughed, he replied, “Not a joke, but you’re welcome to laugh. It’s not my place to say what’s appropriate laughter, not in this world.”
De Armas has received positive reviews for her work in Blonde, though credits have lambasted the film, which holds only a 42% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film does have its passionate defenders: Novelist Bret Easton Ellis just listed it as one of his 12 best films of 2022, and MovieMaker put de Armas and director Andrew Dominik on our fall cover. Critics have largely focused on the belief that the film exploits the memory of Marilyn Monroe, though Dominik and de Armas told us for our cover story that the film is ardently pro-Monroe.
“It was a lot. I felt it,” de Armas told us. “I was going through it, you know? I felt heavy those days. I felt tired. But that only made me feel even more empathy for her, and understanding, because I went through it for nine weeks,” she says. “I can tell you, it was exhausting to be her. So I could only imagine what it was like to be her for 36 years, at that level of intensity and that lack of support.”
But back to Colin Farrell: After his praise for de Armas, the actor, who is also a shoe-in for a Best Actor Oscar nomination, took the time for a more traditional acceptance speech. He thanked, among others, his Banshees of Inisherin director Martin McDonagh for first pairing him with his Banshees co-star Brendan Gleeson 15 years ago, in their film In Bruges.
Main image: Ana de Armas in Blonde.
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