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‘Voyagers’ Review: In Space, Everyone Can Hear You Scream

Emotional anarchy derails a space mission in this insipid sci-fi drama.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

Essentially a zero-gravity “Lord of the Flies,” Neil Burger’s “Voyagers” nevertheless plays like a CW sci-fi pilot for those who find “The 100” too unsanitary. Set aboard a sterile spaceship hurtling toward a distant planet — though any claustrophobic, closed-off environment would have served just as well — this dull dig into human nature owes more to the aesthetics of Calvin Klein than the terrors of outer space.

The year is 2063, Earth is heating up, and a couple of dozen children have been trained to colonize a new world. Bred for intelligence and compliance, these docile pioneers, watched over by a sad-eyed surrogate father named Richard (Colin Farrell), begin an 86-year journey. Almost all will be dead before they reach their destination, so they have been designed to reproduce at timed intervals. Considering they’ve all grown into lissome, blandly attractive young adults, this should not be a problem.

We soon learn, though, that the crew’s universally robotic affect is not simply a deficit in the cast’s acting ability, but the result of a sedative designed to suppress emotion. Figuring this out, Christopher (Tye Sheridan, all pout and pique) and his friend Zac (Fionn Whitehead, in the film’s only vivid performance), stop taking the substance and discover that they’re both hot for the same woman (Lily-Rose Depp). In short order, the noncompliance spreads and the situation on board devolves predictably into an orgy of dancing, wrestling, copulating and running down long corridors. Worse is to follow.

A movie of cold light and hard surfaces, “Voyagers” owes its antiseptic glamour to the cinematographer Enrique Chediak, whose talents far outclass Burger’s underdeveloped script. Mysteries abound, including why Richard (who has been sidelined by an incident I won’t spoil) chose to accompany the voyagers, and why he wears a permanently pained expression.

“I wouldn’t miss a thing,” he tells superiors before he leaves Earth, hinting at a tragic past that’s never explained. Neither is the alien that might be messing around outside the ship — or, as the increasingly maniacal Zac suggests, inside one or more of the crew.

In replicating a society torn apart by lies and fear and gaslighting, “Voyagers” might feel, for some, a bit too close to home for comfort. And as the chaos and violence escalated and rival factions formed, I amused myself by pondering who might be running the ship. I concluded it was the alien.

Voyagers Rated PG-13 for picturesque coupling and ugly behavior. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.

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It has a game cast and a premise ripe with potential, but Voyagers drifts in familiar orbit rather than fully exploring its intriguing themes.

It has a decent cast and some interesting twists on its Lord of the Flies -inspired story, but Voyagers is slow to get going and sputters out in the end.

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Ever wanted to see what Euphoria would be like in space? The new trailer for Lionsgate’s Voyagers will answer that very question whether you wanted it or not. After taking on the YA adaptation of Divergent , writer-director Neil Burger is back with his next sci-fi thriller. Starring Colin Farrell , Tye Sheridan , Lily-Rose Depp , Fionn Whitehead and Isaac Hempstead , Voyagers follows a group of 30 young men and women who travel through space searching for a new home.

The trailer fits the description of what you’d expect from the director of Limitless . From the footage shown, Voyagers seems like a straightforward, by-the-numbers sci-fi thriller set in space. Borrowing from several different films and tropes, our young adults are born and bred in a lab, their emotions tampered down through chemical manipulation drinks. Upon discovering this, Sheridan, Depp and the rest of the teens stop taking their medication and begin experiencing emotions and desires for the first time. Naturally, they engage in lots of fights, sex and any other form of hedonism. To top it all off, the spaceship begins to malfunction and it seems as though they may become stranded.

RELATED: 'Voyagers' Trailer Shows Hot People Getting Their Freak on in Space

Studios have attempted to connect with YA audiences in the past few years with some sci-fi adventure flicks. Ready Player One , Ender’s Game , The 5th Wave , The Maze Runner and The Giver all achieved varying degrees of commercial and critical success. In addition to Voyagers , there are still more YA sci-fi films premiering in 2021, including the crazily delayed Chaos Walking starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley . (Ridley is also set to star in Burger's  upcoming psychological thriller The Marsh King’s Daughter .)

In terms of the star power behind  Voyagers , Farrell is always a joy to watch, as well as this incredible list of up-and-coming actors. All of these performers have an incredible list of projects in the works, with Sheridan being a particular standout. He is most recently attached to George Clooney’s next film The Tender Bar , the adaptation of the acclaimed Vietnam war book The Things They Carried , and Paul Schrader ’s next film The Card Counter . So Voyagers may have to just be on our list of films to watch, simply to see Sheridan before he’s a mega-star.

Voyagers will debut in theaters on April 9. Check out the trailer below and see what you think for yourself.

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Voyagers Is Just Lord of the Flies in Space

The characters in Voyagers are the middle children of an 86-year colonization mission — born on Earth but never really of it, and also unlikely to survive long enough to see the new planet they’re traveling toward. Their lives are slated to unfold almost entirely onboard the spaceship Humanitas , on which they’re both the crew and the future parents and grandparents of the eventual settlers. In an effort to make this regimented existence more tolerable, the planners behind the mission gestated their intergalactic travelers in a lab and raised them in a sealed facility so they wouldn’t get attached to family or to the dying Earth they’d soon leave behind. The crew is also drugged with a substance they call “blue” that dulls their senses, makes them more biddable, and dampens their sex drives, which becomes relevant as the kids grow up into a bunch of dewy-skinned teenagers living in close quarters with no clue that their state of chaste docility is chemically enforced. Then two of their number, Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead), figure it out and stop taking their daily doses, setting off a chain of events that throws the careful order of life onboard into chaos.

On one hand, the premise of Voyagers is a heady one, asking what gives a life meaning when its course is already set, and that same life has been surrendered in service of a future that won’t be experienced. On the other, it offers all sorts of potential for soapy sci-fi shenanigans when the 30 crew members, a diverse group united in looking like they could at any moment star in a Gap ad, go cold turkey and are all plunged into hyperadolescence at the same time. But the film, which was written and directed by Neil Burger (of The Illusionist , Limitless , and more recently, The Upside ), walks a fine line between the philosophical and the frothy, managing with impressive precision to avoid being smart or fun. There is, at least, a short, giddy window in which Christopher and Zac find themselves awakening to emotional and physical sensation, racing down the hallways, zapping their fingers with electricity, and noticing the same nubile colleague, Sela (Lily-Rose Depp). But Zac acts on his newfound attraction by groping Sela against her will, and then challenges Richard Alling (Colin Farrell), the ship’s lone adult, about why he can’t just do whatever he pleases. “We’re just going to die in the end, so why can’t we do what we want? What’s the difference whether we’re good or not?”

There’s a sinking feeling accompanying the realization that, as Christopher and Zac start vying for leadership, Voyagers is becoming Lord of the Flies in space. It’s not just that divisions form in predictable and dramatically inert ways, the performances universally flat and unengaging as one side rebels against the group’s elected leader, giving into paranoia and opting for violence. It’s also that, as the film goes on, there’s a niggling sense that this futuristic retread of a familiar story is meant to say something about our moment — about, say, tribalism and strongman leadership. After a mysterious accident leads to the death of a crew member, Zac goes from “guy who just never thought about consent before” to full-on villain, leveraging fears that there’s an alien in the group’s midst to position himself as a protector and to label anyone who speaks up against him a possible carrier. His turn toward the manipulative and brutal is written as taking place so abruptly that it’s impossible to grasp him as a character or to understand how he’s able to take control so quickly. Rather than show the potential for both brutality and order in the human psyche, even in characters who’ve essentially started as blank slates, Voyagers ends up presenting Zac as an aberration leading the crew into a bout of hysterical overreaction. As allegories for the last few years go, it’s not one that offers much by way of compelling insight.

There have been a few noteworthy movies grappling with the idea of long-term space travel out in the past few years. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar pitted a father’s conflicted desires against the nightmarish stresses of time dilation, his children getting older and older every minute he’s away from Earth, decades slipping away. There was the dismal Passengers , the movie Voyagers most seems to want to echo, a movie about how the vastness of possible years in isolation makes the most inconceivable crimes forgivable. There was Claire Denis’s High Life , equal parts sexy and repulsive, with its coerced crew of criminals hurtling resentfully toward a black hole. But the best recent film to pit the human lifetime against the impossible hugeness of space is the Swedish Aniara from 2018, which is about a luxury liner that’s sent permanently off course on a routine trip taking passengers from Earth to Mars — a kind of serious take on a scenario shared by Armando Iannucci’s Avenue 5 . As the years roll on in the film, the passengers embrace bursts of hedonism and develop new forms of spirituality and contend with all-consuming depression.

It’s a film that might come to mind when watching Voyagers , not just because it actually digs into the possibilities of its premise, but because it really engages with the idea of a life lived in transit without a destination, and with the idea of how different that really is from the lives we’re living now. Voyagers , in keeping its focus where it does, feels like a waste not just because of how predictable its beats are, but because it ends just when it feels like it’s getting interesting.

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• lily-rose depp
• fionn whitehead
• colin farrell

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‘Voyagers’ Review: Colin Farrell Chaperones a YA Thriller That Re-Stages ‘Lord of the Flies’ in Space

David ehrlich.

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Neil Burger only directed the first installment of the ill-fated “Divergent” series before moving on to more lucrative problems (“Billions,” “The Upside”), but his latest film — a self-generated story that re-stages “Lord of the Flies” on a cramped spaceship full of horny teens — suggests an enduring fascination with the same kind of YA futurism that was all the rage back when Lionsgate was hoping to make Beatrice Prior into the next Katniss Everdeen. Between its dystopian overtures, antiseptic white sets, and diverse-ish cast of talented young actors forced to subsume their colorful screen personas into embryonic characters whose dialogue is limited to lines like “what does it feel like to feel something?,” “ Voyagers ” may chart an 86-year course across the galaxy but it certainly doesn’t take viewers anywhere they haven’t already been.

For better or worse, Burger knows it doesn’t have to. The middling but enjoyable “Voyagers” is meant to be a timeless parable about the primitive essence of human nature; if its space-age shenanigans are broadly identical to the beats of a book William Golding wrote about a group of preadolescent boys who crash on a deserted island during World War II, that’s more of a feature than it is a bug. It doesn’t excuse the script for being a universe wide and an inch deep, or let Burger off the hook for telling a story about chaos that follows the cleanest possible route to its predetermined destination, but it does make it easier to appreciate “Voyagers” for the bolder choices that it makes along the way.

Choices like assigning its young space cadets a chaperone played by Colin Farrell. The year is 2063, and — surprise, surprise — Earth isn’t doing so great. It turns out that denying the reality of climate change didn’t make the problem go away, and now humanity has to find a new rock to call home. The good news is that we’ve found one; the bad news is that it will take almost a full century for our scouting vessel to reach the distant planet and determine its viability. The solution: we’ll create a genetically engineered fleet of gifted children (the offspring of MIT scientists and Nobel laureates) whose sole purpose in life will be to repopulate aboard the Humanitas so that their grandkids will one day be alive to touch down in the new world.

“Voyagers” is never more engaging than when it confronts the underlying truth of this grim mission: We all inherited the same one. We’re all hurtling through space and wrestling with our directives as we chart a course towards a future we’ll never live to see, the only difference is that we have the luxury of being distracted from the task at hand.

Farrell plays Richard, a scientist and sad-eyed father figure whose job is to make sure that these star children keep their eyes on the prize. Implausibly (yet now undeniably) one of the best actors in the Milky Way, Farrell has been known to show off his soft underbelly when the mood strikes, but he’s never been quite as sweet or tender as he is here in the role of a man who volunteers to lead all 30 of his step-kids into the void. All parents ask themselves why they brought their children into this world; the pained wrinkle Richard wears on his face is that of someone who’s cursed to know the answer. Also maybe that of someone who’s cursed to single-handedly supervise 30 pre-adolescents at an intergalactic daycare until he dies.

Fortunately for Richard — and unfortunately for the dramatic intrigue of the film around him — everyone aboard the Humanitas is made docile by the blue space drink they take every day. They just don’t know that yet. The ultra-obedient kids mature into ultra-obedient young adults who are happy enough to live like lab rats, wear sexless blue uniforms, and keep their minds on the mission and off of each other… even though Burger’s photogenic cast seems less like the progeny of scientists and Nobel laureates and more like the progeny of hot actors and even hotter actors. Alas, shit goes sideways in a hurry once the blandly virtuous Christopher ( Tye Sheridan , his face morphing into Sidney Crosby) and the blandly malevolent Zac (“Dunkirk” lead Fionn Whitehead , here given actual dialogue) discover what’s in the water and decide to rebel. Sorry for wanting to keep a bunch of hormonal teenagers from getting handsy and overpopulating the ship that’s entrusted with saving the human race, you guys.

You know what happens from there. One minute the boys are looking at the comely Sela (a stoic Lily-Rose Depp ) as if they’ve never seen her before, and the next they’re screaming the deep space equivalent of “kill the pig!” as they hunt each other to death through the ship’s corridors. Burger assembles a smart and eclectic group of super promising young actors — the supporting cast includes “Blinded by the Light” breakout Viveik Kalra, “Game of Thrones” survivor Isaac Hempstead Wright, “Roxanne Roxanne” star Chanté Adams, and Disney Channel graduate Madison Hu — but none of them are given much to do beyond picking sides and providing a fragile sense of community.

Whitehead sharpens Zac into a dangerous shiv of unchecked id, but “Voyagers” is often rendered inert by the same tabula rasa tenor that inspired this project. For all of the patience and fatalistic grace that Burger mines from the initial half of the film, there’s something inherently dull about watching grown-ish people cycle through our most primitive emotions for the first time, and Burger veers off course by positioning the blunt forces of lust and rage as spectacles unto themselves rather than as means to an end. (At one point, the characters watch a montage of animalistic behavior that peaks with a clip from “The Cabin in the Woods.”)

The script is peppered with all of the expected lip-service about reason and compromise — about the tenuous balance between identity and groupthink in a moral vacuum where everyone dies at the end of the day — but “Voyagers” is far more interested in the first stirrings of feeling than it is exploring how civilization depends on taming our true nature. The predictability inherent to any honest “Lord of the Flies” riff becomes a problem in a movie that’s literally on auto-pilot, if only because “Voyagers” is as enamored by its discoveries as the characters are themselves, and races through their consequences with all the nuance of a story that needs to clean up the entire mess of human nature in the span of a single action sequence.

And yet any old story being retold by virtue of a new setting is going to live or die on the strength of that setting, and that’s where “Voyagers” delivers the goods. Production designer Scott Chambliss hasn’t taken a radical approach to the look of the Humanitas — it’s the kind of spaceship Jony Ive might create, all clean lines and smooth plastics — but the utopian vibe offers an effective counterpoint to the anarchy that soon floods the hallways. Cinematographer Enrique Chediak shoots the action with an inventive streak that plays up the “mouse in a maze” of it all, as his camera rig speeds along the ceiling in pursuit of characters who are suddenly realizing how little space they have to live. If only the rest of this destination-oriented thriller were as thoughtful about the journey required to get there.

Lionsgate will release “Voyagers” in theaters on Friday, April 9.

As new movies open in theaters during the COVID-19 pandemic, IndieWire will continue to review them whenever possible. We encourage readers to follow the safety precautions provided by CDC and health authorities. Additionally, our coverage will provide alternative viewing options whenever they are available.

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The Ending Of Voyagers Explained

Voyagers , the latest science fiction film starring Tye Sheridan and Lily-Rose Depp is, in a way, a sort of Lord of the Flies set on a starship far from the reaches of Earth and human civilization. While the children in Lord of the Flies wind up trapped on an island by accident, the young people onboard this starship (which is more of an ark) are there by design. In both cases, the adolescent ensemble has to reckon with the chaos of a world without adult rules.

On its face, Voyagers has a familiar sci-fi premise: The Earth's time is running out. Richard ( Colin Farrell ), a scientist with a plan, takes a crew of young people who have never interacted with the rest of the world into space, where they will live and eventually breed the next generation of humans. The hope is that their children will eventually arrive on a new world for humanity to populate. So, a pretty standard execution of the generation ship trope.

The stars of Voyagers will never see that new world. They are the intermediary generation between the humans of Earth and their children, who will hopefully be the ones to kickstart human civilization all over again someplace new. The end of Voyagers and its meaning are tied to the chaos of what happens aboard that lonely vessel in the blackness of space. Here's the ending of  Voyagers explained.  Major spoilers ahead.

Voyagers ending isn't about the future, it's about right now

Richard's big plan once everyone's on the ship is to trick the kids into self-medicating with something called "The Blue," which is essentially a cocktail of anti-androgens and other meds designed to keep everybody sexless and docile. But the kids find out about the drug, and they stop taking it. Without The Blue, the kids become volatile, which results in Richard's death, leaving the kids to fend for themselves.

These kids may not have experienced much of Earth, but they're still human, so they do exactly what humans do — they vie for power through violence and manipulation. They even create a pretend evil alien designed to explain away Richard's death. More crewmembers die and, for a while there, it seems like the entire mission will end with no survivors.

The movie actually ends with a détente, however. Two male leaders, Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead), who have been struggling for control of the mission, accept the compromise that Sela (Lily-Rose Depp) the medic will take charge. Christopher and Zac step down and cease hostilities, but they agree that everyone will stop taking The Blue.

The movie ends showing that these people do age, and do indeed procreate. Their progeny do make it to a new world. The resolution is a major contrast with the rest of the chaotic and violent third act. It begs a metaphorical reading of the movie's plot: Earth is our vessel, and like the crew of the fictional starship, we are often manipulated by one another into doing self-harm. We have these periods of volatility, during which we wonder if the human species will make it to see another day, but even when our interests seem diametrically opposed, it's the process of reconciliation that guarantees our future.

Voyagers looks to this future, but it reminds us of our past, too. It reminds us that there has always been chaos caused by humanity, which carries the risk of extinction. We've survived wars, we've endured genocides, and we've navigated the creation of planet-destroying weapons. All of these wounds are self-inflicted, and yet we are still here. What Voyagers is daring us to believe with its ending is that we will not only keep surviving, but that we'll thrive for so long that we'll reach out into the farthest parts of the galaxy to inhabit new worlds. It's an optimistic movie in the end.

Voyagers (2021)

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Voyagers review – horny Lord of the Flies in space quickly crashes to earth

Colin Farrell leads a crew of genetically engineered and chemically subdued youths on a perilous journey in a film that doesn’t have the guts to explore its perverse premise

T here’s a tantalising R-rated premise at the centre of the PG-13-rated sci-fi thriller Voyagers. In the future, the Earth is slowly becoming uninhabitable (something that’s depressingly less fiction and more science) and so a crew is assembled, by a muted Colin Farrell , to travel to another planet to check for viability, a familiar set-up given a novel spin. Because of the length of the journey – a rather off-putting 86 years – participants will be created rather than procured, spliced together from the finest DNA and grown in a lab, their sole purpose to begin the trip, procreate and let their children and then their children lead the way.

But deep into the quest, a shocking discovery is made: the crew is being drugged. A blue liquid they’re told to take daily (explained away as some sort of enzyme mixture) is revealed to be something far more nefarious: a cocktail of chemicals aimed at subduing their impulses. By removing the ability to feel or desire extremities (fear, excitement, horniness) they are then made more docile and in turn more effective at achieving their mission. When two members decide to stop taking it, disaster strikes.

The possibilities teased by writer-director Neil Burger (who dealt with a loosely alternate version of this concept in 2011’s thrill pill drama Limitless) are intriguing. How would submissive, isolated youths growing up without any influence from the outside world deal with a sudden cracked upon universe of sexual desire and rampant emotions? With training designed specifically to cover the practical side of their trip, how would they then understand concepts of consent and responsibility? What dangers would arise? But such thorniness is soon blunted in the ho hum execution, a Lord of the Flies-lite drama that plays out more like a YA adaptation of a book fans would claim is far better.

The trippy neon trailer would have you believe that we’re entering Gaspar Noé-adjacent territory, all psychedelic head fuckery and playful perversity, but Burger is too restrained, too polite to take us anywhere quite so extreme. The heightened emotions felt by the crew are never really felt by us the audience, there’s a headiness that’s missing and in the brief moments when Burger does try to convey the characters’ giddy intensity, he relies on a failed visual motif, a dated montage of discordant images, closer to a musty 90s Windows screensaver than something from a film released in 2021. The script never really grapples with the dark implications of his conceit, how without regulation and law, the youths would embrace their wilder side in more horrifying ways, choosing instead to tiptoe rather than forcefully tread, a psychosexual cautionary tale rendered impotent.

Sex is lightly suggested (again in opposition to what the trailers promise) while any form of sexual fluidity is nowhere to be seen, Burger’s script perhaps, hopefully unintentionally implying that queerness is less nature and more nurture. But such big thinking would suggest that much thinking has actually gone into Voyagers, a generous assertion, given how anything remotely challenging is quickly chucked into deep space and replaced by rote formula. The crew inevitably divides into warring factions battling for supremacy but such little care is taken with the characters that we struggle to care who wins out. Tye Sheridan, Fionn Whitehead and Lily Rose-Depp are the only three who get the lightest of look-ins but not one of them is able to do much with the scraps they’ve been given, leaving the ramped-up conflict ineffective as the film crashes toward a predictable conclusion. The production design is sleek but anonymous and aside from the specifics of the set-up, there are no particularly inventive elements to Burger’s vision of the future, nothing to distract us from the rather dull human drama.

It’s all just too sanitised and safe, a journey that stumbles as it takes us from the unknown to the familiar, a film that plods when it should stride. How did a bracing idea about rebellion, sexual awakening and lawlessness turn out so boring?

Voyagers is out in cinemas in the US on 9 April, and in the UK on 8 October on Sky Cinema and NOW.

• Science fiction and fantasy films
• Colin Farrell
• Drama films

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Product Description

With the future of the human race in danger, a group of young men and women, bred for enhanced intelligence and to suppress emotional impulses, embark on an expedition to colonize a distant planet. But when they uncover disturbing secrets about the mission, they defy their training and begin to explore their most primitive natures. As life on the ship descends into chaos, they're consumed by fear, lust, and the hunger for power. VOYAGERS is a euphoric thriller about the explosive awakening of our most primal desires.

Product details

• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned)
• Package Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.81 x 5.39 x 0.51 inches; 2.88 ounces
• Director ‏ : ‎ Neil Burger
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ NTSC, Subtitled
• Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 48 minutes
• Release date ‏ : ‎ June 15, 2021
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Colin Farrell, Tye Sheridan, Lily-Rose Depp, Fionn Whitehead, Viveik Kalra
• Dubbed: ‏ : ‎ Spanish
• Producers ‏ : ‎ Neil Burger, Greg Shapiro, Basil Iwanyk, Stuart Ford, Brendon Boyea
• Studio ‏ : ‎ Lionsgate Home Entertainment
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0914VR3TT
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 2
• #21,306 in Blu-ray

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“Her husband wasn’t kind enough to leave the room”: Colin Farrell Had a Hard Time Kissing Kate Beckinsale in 1 Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie Remake for Obvious Reasons

O ver the years, Colin Farrell has starred in many kinds of projects. Range is one of his greatest specialties, as he can go from playing complex emotional characters to action heroes and even The Penguin in The Batman . Despite this, there is one aspect of a movie that stays consistent across most genres and films; romance.

In 2012, he starred in the reboot of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s classic film, Total Recall . While the film did not do exceptionally well, there was one aspect during filming that made it especially difficult for Farrell.

His co-star, Kate Beckinsale, proved to be a particularly difficult actress to kiss because of one predisposition.

Colin Farrell Was Put In A Tough Spot

In Total Recall , Colin Farrell’s Douglas Quaid was involved with Kate Beckinsale’s Lori Quaid. Since the two characters were clearly married, they had to kiss each other more than once during the movie’s filming. During an interview with Conan O’Brien, he revealed that this aspect of the film was especially awkward for him. The reason for this was the director of the movie, Len Wiseman.

While there is no denying that Wiseman is excellent at what he does, at the time, he was married to Beckinsale, and they had been involved with each other for over five years.

She’s actually the director’s wife. She’s married to the director. [It was] moderately uncomfortable.

“Are we making an action movie? Then why don’t I hear action”: Colin Farrell Had a Hard Time Digesting Tom Cruise’s Ultra-Perfectionism in $358M Movie

This specifically put Farrell in a tough spot, as he was forced to kiss his director’s wife in front of an entire crowd of people. It is safe to say that the  Banshees of Inisherin actor was not looking forward to this part of the shooting.

Things Got Worse

Although many actors have been put in tough spots like this, having to kiss their married co-stars, and knowing that they are eventually going to see it, it has been fairly normalized within the industry. It was not like Len Wiseman was not aware of what was happening. He perhaps had a hand in the intimate details of the scene. However, just when Colin Farrell did not think it could get any worse, it did.

Kissing her was a little bit dodgy ’cause the director, her husband, wasn’t kind enough to leave the room

“Stayed with me most”: Colin Farrell’s 2009 Film Which Became a Massive Box Office Flop is Strangely Also the One That Changed His Life the Most

During the interview, Farrell revealed just how awkward he felt, and it is safe to assume that this will go down in history as one of the most uncomfortable on-screen kisses of all time.