Colin Farrell has opened up about his most terrifying role yet, as he star in drama, Thirteen Lives, which required him to work underwater.
The film is based on the 2018 Thai cave rescue, when twelve boys from a Thai soccer team and their coach went swimming in the Tham Luang cave and were trapped after an unexpected rainstorm.
The project was filmed in special built replica caves, which Colin confessed to Entertainment Tonight, were awful to film in.
Saying: “Terrifying in a word. Terrifying, it really was — it was scary.”
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“I’m not a great swimmer anyway, not that we were swimming, not that we were treading water, we had to stay on the surface, but they built a really impressive network of caves, it was about four or five different caves that were based on the topography of the caves, the Tham Luang caves in Thailand, and they filled them full of water, and we’d go down and there was no up.”
The Batman star revealed how the enclosed nature of the crave, were difficult to swim in, saying: “I mean, there’s a lot to be said for being able to look up in water and see the surface, so when you can’t and there’s actually a ceiling over your head, and there’s no air at all, it just wreaks havoc on my mind,”
“We had amazing assistants, we had Rick Stanton there, we had Jason Mallinson, who were two of the gentlemen who were part of the five that swim the team out, but man, I had panic attacks underwater, that’s a new experience. A panic attack underwater is a new experience for me.”
The set was incredible hazardous, with their safety diving team saying it was the most dangerous project they had worked on.
“I mean, at the end of the day, we did have amazing safety divers and a team of safety divers, but I asked one of the safety divers on one of the days we were — he spends a lot of time in the tanks floating and talking, when we weren’t shooting I said, ‘How many films have you done,’ and the safety diver said, ‘About twenty underwater films.’ I said, what was the most dangerous — and you know where this is going — they went, ‘This one.'”
