In Reunited, Awards Insider hosts a conversation between two Oscar contenders who have collaborated on a previous project. Today, we speak with Good Luck to You, Leo Grande star Emma Thompson and The Banshees of Inisherin star Colin Farrell. They previously worked together on 2013’s Saving Mr. Banks.

Colin Farrell and Emma Thompson have such a lovely and loving rapport with each other it’s hard to believe that they’ve never actually appeared together onscreen. They both starred in 2013’s Saving Mr. Banks, but Farrell played Thompson’s character’s father in flashback scenes, so they never got to be together on set. Still, they spent time before filming and on the press tour, building up a bond based on their shared sense of humor and outlook on acting.

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This year, they both starred in films that explore loneliness and companionship, though their characters go on very different journeys. In the Irish dark comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, Farrell plays Pádraic Súilleabháin, a simple man whose best friend (Brendan Gleeson) decides he no longer wants to speak to him. In Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Thompson’s Nancy finds companionship (and her sexual awakening) with an escort (Daryl McCormack) after the death of her husband. 

Over Zoom, Thompson and Farrell reminisce about watching Mary Poppins at his home, how their characters both grapple with loneliness in different ways and how they grapple with their own legacies—or don’t. 

Vanity Fair: What do you remember about the first time you met?

Emma Thompson: I think there were two things before we started shooting. You and I had a dinner together, just the two of us, in a little restaurant and I remember you were looking very-

Colin Farrell: Scruffy?

Thompson: Sexy. You had your shirt undone. I think you had one button undone that was, I felt, going a little far.

Farrell: It was Tuesday then. Tuesday's my sexy day.

Thompson: I thought, "I like this guy's style. He's not afraid to just live it." And then we had a really interesting chat and we smoked, which was quite naughty.  It felt quite naughty because it's Los Angeles. You light up a cigarette and you might as well be shooting up in the street. And then you gave an incredibly kind and generous evening at your house, for all of us. And you showed Mary Poppins. And I met your lovely sister and I think I met one of your kids, actually.

Farrell: It was a lovely evening. I don't have many evenings like that. I'm not that much of a social butterfly and it was one of the few evenings in this home, in the home that me and my boys have lived together for 16 years. 

Thompson: And Mary Poppins was so long, it actually covered the whole evening. 

Even though you didn’t have any scenes together, what were your impressions of each other?

Thompson: Well, I mean, I'd seen Col in Scott Frank's thriller [Minority Report]. What was it called?

Farrell: Fuck. I should know that, shouldn't I?

Thompson: Jesus, you were in the fucking thing!

Farrell: I blame drugs!

Thompson: Anyway, but I'd seen you in lots and lots of stuff, but I also knew that you were a wild Irish man and I know that's just right up my alley, so I was just so thrilled to find that what you didn't seem to me to be at all, was angry. At the time when I met you, you were just full of light somehow. Open and of course, complex and yes, issues. Who hasn't and why wouldn't we? We're actors, for crying out loud. What use would we be if we had no issues? We'd be rubbish. But there was all this light coming off you and that was just so lovely. I know that even though we haven't actually sat down with each other for 10 years, if we just sat down, it would be like we saw each other yesterday. I think it's a wee bit Celtic, that, too. Isn't it?

Farrell: Totally. I think there's a tribalism that is not about separation, but it is about inclusion. “Tribalism” has this negative connotation, of course, and rightfully so in the way that word has been used and abused culturally and socially, but there is a tribalism where there's a recognition of kinship, which is really deep, which defies gender, defies era, and it really goes deeper than I can ever trace an origin to.

And I felt that with you. And your humor! The Irish have been accused of using humor to deflect. I don't think we use humor to deflect. I think we use humor to find our way into the truth, and that's something that's very clear with you. You're incredibly funny, you're so quick, all that obvious stuff. But it's never glib. The truth is always floating around, at least the periphery, if not at the very center of what you're joking about in any given moment. And it's beautiful. It's beautiful because it allows us to enjoy the certain truths that you may be sharing with us or experiences rather than feel lectured at or spoken to or any of that stuff.

Thompson: I'm watching you in Banshees — Oh God, it broke my heart. It just broke my heart in two, just this heart, this sort of little heart walking around, completely vulnerable and nothing to protect it at all, really. And then so suddenly being punched, like watching Brendan [Gleeson]'s character  literally punch you right in your heart. It's so painful. 

Farrell: It's an opposite journey, isn't it, from yours in Good Luck? Yours is about an awakening. Yours is about going from the darkness that can be experienced when oppression and repression is as stark as it was in your marriage, which is not to say your marriage was loveless. Going from that to actually opening up, to self-realization through that most important channel, which I think is stronger and even bolder and braver and more emotionally connected for women than it is for men. We have our version, of course, not to get into a gender debate, but it's about your character coming alive to herself and to the beauty in life as she can experience it.

My guy was the other way around. When you meet him, he's connected. He’s connected to nature, he's connected to his friends. He's not the sharpest fucking tool in the shed, but he's a good person who is actually just experiencing the joy of the moment every single day and there's kind of a wisdom to that. It's not intellectual, it's not that interesting, maybe, to observe, but it's beautiful to inhabit. And he inhabits a purity that I've never — and I'm fine with never — but I've never accessed it to the same degree he does and as consistently as he does. And by the end of the film, it's gone.

Thompson: This terrible loss has just completely taken away something so deep about his humanity. He just won't find his way back. You know he won't find his way back. And it's unbearable, actually, really unbearable.

Whereas with Nancy, what she's found for the first time is the relationship with herself that has always been missing. So she has been the good girl. She's been the girl that we all have met, not only in Ireland, but also in Scotland, and certainly in England. I must have gone to school with a lot of these girls who grew up thinking that first of all, it was very important for girls to be good, and not to protest, and not to make a fuss, and not to embarrass anybody, and not to ask for what they want. And so many don't, as life goes on, they don't develop the habit of working out what they might like because it's not what it's about. It's what other people need from them. Because women do absolutely everything for everyone, all the fucking time. You know?

Farrell: It's so true!

Thompson: And I've never been trained to say, "What is it that I would like? Or what would I want to do in this situation?" And Nancy asks all those questions, she says, "I don't know whether I would've had children." I mean, actually, I think she might have done, but —

Farrell: But she knew she didn't even ask. It wasn't even a question. It wasn't even that there was an opportunity.

Thompson: Seriously. I mean, my grandmother who lived with us, she said to me once, I've never forgotten it, she said, "I feel sorry for men because they have to do it." And I realized at that moment, talking to my 80-year-old grandmother, that she had never experienced sexual pleasure.

Farrell: Wow!

Thompson: Actually, I heard my mom and dad having sex one night when I was 16. I was coming back from being out with my best mate at school. And we came back and we heard them and we ran upstairs. We probably sounded like a herd of wildebeest. And we locked ourselves in the bathroom and laughed for about half an hour. We just couldn't stop laughing. But I think somewhere in my deeper self, there was a gladness.

Farrell: I was going to say, it's kind of lovely.

Thompson: What was so interesting about Katy's script was I didn't realize how deeply upset Nancy was about not having ever had oral sex. You know, you read it and you think, "Oh, that's hilarious and that's going to be funny, blah, blah, blah." And then when I started to play her and I suddenly realized she was terribly upset. And that it made her cry because something had been lost and lost forever.

Farrell: She had this loneliness imposed upon her in this marriage that wasn't a bad marriage. It was just staid and it was passionless-

Thompson: It was a textbook marriage.

Farrell: But there was a loneliness, of course, in it and it was imposed upon her by conditioning and by circumstance and by a little bit of choice. But there didn't seem to be much else. And Pádraic had loneliness imposed upon him. Your character broke from that loneliness. It was imposed upon him and I dissented deeper into that loneliness.

It was one of the most interesting things for me during lockdown. Even while understanding it was all temporary, aloneness is really important to me. Solitude is really important to me. I love people as well. But it really is more important the older I get, and it's not in an antisocial way. It's a very deep way and it's a lovely thing when I can get my hands on it.

Thompson: I know! Me too.

Farrell: But it's a choice. When aloneness is imposed upon a person, so many people in this world have nobody to reach out to, it's a carcinogen. You know? Lockdown imposed an aloneness on people who had never experienced aloneness before. I think that was one of the most powerful things about that time that we all shared on this planet too.

Thompson: Are you having good sex at the moment, Col?

Farrell: What, love?

Thompson: I said, are you having good sex at the moment?

Farrell: Oh, God. That's a different Zoom, darling. Email me.

Part of the story in Banshees is Brendan's character is thinking about his legacy and his work living on beyond him. How do you view legacy when it comes to your work?

Farrell: Oh, I don't know. Truly, I mean, don't get me wrong, I got tickled pink when I heard that The New World, a film I did years ago, was being put in the Criterion Collection. That tickled me. Because it kind of said, "Oh, it's going to stay around a little bit." Or it's going to be in a fucking dark library in New York that actors are going to go and do a 15-minute segment on YouTube where they pick their five favorite films. Whatever. I was tickled by it.

But I truly don't consider myself a legacy. My legacy is quite clearly the two sons that I've been raising, one for 19 years and another for 13 years, and the gift that they are in my life. Truly. Excuse the quaintness of that.

Banks would certainly be in there because I've spoken to people, I don't put this veil on it myself, but I've spoken to people that said that they experienced an amount of healing, watching Saving Mr. Banks. And I've spoken to a couple of people about Banshees or they've spoken to me about how they felt less alone watching the film.

So those things are nice. It's not about legacy. You don't go to work, I certainly don't go to work every time, to affect the world. I go to make a living. Sometimes I go to have just a bit of fun. But you're always asking questions. And when the questions that I hold, just as a human being, are exposed to be as communal as I truly wish them to be, that's a lovely thing. It makes me feel less alone as well. 

Thompson: I think legacy's a very masculine concept. I think it's the idea of “will I have a statue? Will people remember me?” I think that's peculiarly masculine and a particular kind of masculinity. It's sort of patriarchal, isn't it? It comes from conquest. It comes from the notions of the legacies of Caesar and things. I mean, even the great artists, they wouldn't necessarily think of it as legacy. They might think of it as a body of work.

But I agree with you, Col. I feel like we're actors and the nice thing about actors is we don't leave anything behind. We don't leave shit behind, paintings, books, whatever. We're just here for a bit, then we die and we're gone.

So maybe the legacy is about making something that has had a healing effect. That's a very nice feeling. They're like little healing stitches where there were wounds, maybe something that we do as actors, where something that we're able to express can just stitch that little wound together. And if we leave a few stitches in the great tapestry, that's enough. Right?