Colin Farrell finds his inner nebbish in 'The Lobster'

Most of the time - in everything from Phone Booth to Total Recall (the remake) to the second season of HBO's True Detective - Colin Farrell walks around like he's going to explode. He's either raging mad or showing every indication that he might turn that way at the drop of a hat, an insult, a gun.

He paces. He snarls. He's borderline feral.

But not the Colin Farrell who appears in the strange (and brilliant) indie The Lobster, which opened Friday.

"He's rather docile, isn't he?" the actor says - happily - about his protagonist, David, a widower who finds himself in a strange hotel where he and all the other guests are on the lookout for partners.

In fact, in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos' near-future tale - his English-language debut - David's very existence hinges on his finding a new mate. If he fails to fall in love after 45 days, he will be taken to the Transformation Room and be turned into an animal. It can be the animal of his choice.

David takes this news - and the rules and rituals that come with it - with absolute calm. Wearing an unexceptional mustache and a pair of ordinary eyeglasses, Farrell's David is quiet, cautious, restrained - adjectives rarely associated with the Irish actor.

"He is very passive," Farrell says, on the phone the other day in a car heading west on Sunset Boulevard ("Hands-free, very much hands-free," he assures).

"But the beautiful thing about him, for me, was the distinct lack of guile. If you're playing a character, whether they're a contemporary character or a character that hails from some period of antiquity, they're all unique, hopefully, but they all follow a strain of conventionality with regards to their emotional lives. . . . There's always a certain amount of guile and subtext within the characters that you play. The references come from what exists, or had existed, in the world around them.

"The Lobster defies all that."

In the world of The Lobster - winner of the Jury Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival - Farrell's character has an awkward innocence. Until he meets up with a woman in the woods, a woman who cocks her head and speaks in precise sentences - and who is played with a minimalist grace by Rachel Weisz - Farrell's David remains a man of inaction, a man who takes things in, takes his orders without fuss.

But despite the film's quiescent hero and its allegorical, sci-fi-ish premise, the world of The Lobster - which also stars John C. Reilly, Léa Seydoux, and Ben Whishaw - is instantly recognizable.

"You see a lot of the same longings and the same fears, a lot of the same anxieties and a lot of the same sadnesses that we all experience as human beings," Farrell says. "But at the same time, the way the characters are drawn, and the way David is drawn . . . there's a sincerity that I found really, really kind of liberating."

So liberating, in fact, that Farrell has signed on for Lanthimos' next film, The Killing of the Sacred Deer, set to start shooting in the fall.

"As an actor, your dream is - well, mine is - to find and work on material that is unique," Farrell says. "And every now and then you come upon a voice like Yorgos Lanthimos' - a most particular voice."

That voice can be heard - and seen - in Dogtooth, a 2011 Academy Award best-foreign language feature nominee, in which Lanthimos turns his attention to parenting issues, to the stabbing of a cat, to oral sex, and to the life lessons to be gleaned from watching Flashdance and Rocky IV.

"I had such a visceral reaction to Dogtooth," Farrell says. "That was my introduction to the cinematic, psychological, emotional universe of Yorgos Lanthimos. So I was a little bit prepped - I knew I was stepping into a realm of storytelling that was particular in the extreme."

And extreme in particular. Both Dogtooth and The Lobster were dreamed up by Lanthimos, along with his writing partner, Efthymis Filippou.

"They're very clever men," Farrell says, "but they are not concerned with demonstrating how clever they are. They're concerned with using whatever intellect and whatever instincts they have to get beneath the skin of the world.

"But it doesn't feel like a trick. When I read The Lobster screenplay, it wasn't like they were winking to the audience, or saying, 'Isn't this all very clever?'

"As smart as it was and as logical as the whole universe they've created is, it didn't seem like they were patting themselves on the back."

Between the two Lanthimos' titles, Farrell found himself working in a decidedly more mainstream vein. He plays the villainous wizard Percival Graves in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a Harry Potter spin-off - a prequel - that also stars Eddie Redmayne, Ezra Miller, and Ron Perlman.

"It's written by J.K. Rowling," Farrell says. "It's the first script she's written. And it's directed by David Yates, who directed the final four Harry Potters. We finished in January. It will be out in November. I haven't seen a lick of it. I'm curious."

Reminded that he's on the phone (hands-free, remember) with a reporter from Philadelphia, Farrell gets excited, harking back to Dead Man Down, the noirish crime drama he filmed here in 2012. "I love Philadelphia," he says. "I loved shooting there. We stayed in Rittenhouse Square."

Not a grand success, Dead Man Down - a tale of vengeance and betrayal with Dominic Cooper, Terrence Howard, and Noomi Rapace - is probably mostly remembered by locals for the dramatic gunplay staged along Walnut Street. Traffic was tied up for days, nights.

"I meant to say you're very welcome for all that," Farrell quips.

srea@phillynews.com

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