For many years, Christmas Day for Colin Farrell meant a trip to hospital. Not for health reasons – the actor would visit to give out toys to sick young patients. “There’s a children’s hospital in Crumlin, Dublin, that used to be called Our Lady’s,” Farrell tells me, when we meet at an event organised by the Los Angeles philanthropic body the Golden Globes Foundation. “I’d go every Christmas when I used to spend my Christmas in Ireland. My sister Claudine would call up Banba, the toy shop in Dublin, we’d fill up two big vans full of toys and go out to Crumlin with them. We’d go out about 12 o’clock and we’d stay there till three or four in the afternoon, going through the different wards and handing out toys.
“It was a strange thing,” he recalls, “because you want to be respectful – you’re stepping into a very serious domain where people are struggling, and you can’t just go in there going, ‘Hello, I’m an actor – Happy Christmas!’ Not everyone even wants to see you. It was more a case of saying, ‘I see you. I’m sorry for what you’re going through. You’re extraordinarily brave and I wish you all the best going forward. Here’s a toy for your child.’
“It was a really heartbreaking and tough four hours to experience. But I’d leave that hospital filled with love and concern and gratitude. They were the most profound Christmas moments I ever had – the best and the worst.”
Times have changed on both sides of the Atlantic since those days. In 2005, Our Lady’s Hospital became Children’s Health Ireland, while Farrell, now based full-time in Los Angeles, finds it harder to nip back to Ireland for visits as he now has a sick child of his own to take care of.
James Farrell, Farrell’s 21-year-old son, was born with Angelman syndrome, which results in a happy personality but severe intellectual and developmental disorder, whose symptoms include seizures and difficulties with both speech and movement.
“When James was born, we thought he was perfect,” Farrell says. “Well, he is perfect – he’s a lovely young man – but we thought he was physically and neurologically perfect too. And it turns out he has a condition. At first he was misdiagnosed as having cerebral palsy, which is a common misdiagnosis because cerebral palsy and Angelman syndrome share similar characteristics, so at first we didn’t know which way it was going to go; but by the time he was two, he was already having seizures, and I knew that he had profound, significant developmental delays.”
An instinctively, if unconventionally, spiritual man, Farrell admits that he began to look at life in a very different way. “You really do take nothing for granted,” he says. “There’s a deep sense of fear – I’ve run through hospitals with James in my arms when he was having a seizure – but there’s also a deeper sense of love and respect. You know how you hear that a child’s first steps are a seminal moment in the life of the parent – as well as the child, of course! – well, if you’ve been told there’s a chance your child will never walk at all, those steps take on a whole new meaning. They go into another realm.”
Farrell also gave up drink and drugs. “I think James was two when I got sober,” he says, “and the most significant and purest part of the fuel that I used to get off alcohol and drugs and all that stuff was knowing that he had health issues. All children need their parents – or a parent or a grandparent or somebody – to care for them. One of the things James has taught me was to access within myself a desire to live, even if it was initially more about me thinking I wanted to live to be around for him. He’s taught me a lot. Both of my boys have taught me a lot.”
Farrell talks less in public about his 15-year-old younger son, Henry, than he does about James, simply because, Henry being neurotypical, there is less that he feels he needs to say. But it quickly becomes plain that his love for both of his sons is fierce and equal. “I really do feel,” he says, “that both of my boys have raised me more than I could ever raise them. I know that sounds quaint and twee, but it’s very true. Whatever man I am today has a lot to do with my parents and my upbringing, sure – but it’s also very, very much to do with what my boys, by virtue of their presence in my life, have asked of me.”
His next challenge, he says, is finding a place for James to live where he can be safe and cared for as he enters adulthood.
“It’s tricky,” Farrell admits. “Some parents will say, ‘Well, I don’t want to put my child anywhere, I want to take care of my child myself.’ I respect that. But what if I have a heart attack tomorrow, and, God forbid, James’s mother, Kim, has a car crash in a month and she’s taken too – and then James is on his own? Then he’s a ward of the state, and where does he go? We’d have no say. So what his mother and I want is to find somewhere we like where he can go now, while we’re still alive and healthy, where we can visit and take him out sometimes. We want him to find somewhere where he can have a full and happy life, where he feels connected.”
Farrell says that he and Kim have already started to look for such places, and because of their horror at the lack of suitable facilities, he has founded a charity, the Colin Farrell Foundation, dedicated to helping families who also have members with similar disabilities.
“It’s been a struggle for us to find suitable residential care for James,” he says. “And in realising that, I thought, if I’m having these difficulties, what about all the other families out there that don’t have anything close to the means that I have? I’ve always known I wanted to do something about this, but until now I’ve been self-centredly busy in raising my own two kids. But now, they’re up and running and I feel I have a bit more space to do something. It’s early days for the foundation yet, so we’re still on baby steps, but we want to do so much in this area.”
Is it an unusual quest in these troubled political times? Not a bit, he says – now is, if anything, the best time ever. “There’s fracture everywhere in the world these days,” he agrees. “All sorts of energies are brushing up against each other. What the founding of the foundation has shown me is that people are tired of that. They really are. They just want to have a space where their decency and their kindness and their desire to connect with each other can be articulated.
“The foundation is not about anything political or ideological. We’re there for one reason – to express our love for our children and figure out how to provide as best as possible an opportunity for them to live as full a life as possible. And that’s cool. It’s exciting, you know?”
<em>Photo: Colin Farrell and his son Henry during the NBA Cup game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Oklahoma City Thunder at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, California, USA, 29 November 2024. (Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images.)</em>
<em>Gabrielle Donnelly is a journalist based in Los Angeles, and writes </em>The Immigrant Chronicles <em>blog. For more on the foundation, visit colinfarrellfoundation.org</em>
