Colin Farrell Reveals How He Got on Tom Cruise’s Bad Side on the Minority Report Set

Colin Farrell told a brutal little story on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert about the exact kind of on-set day you hope never happens to you — the one where it is your birthday, you feel like death, and Tom Cruise is watching you blow line after line.

The birthday shoot from hell

• Farrell says this went down on his birthday — May 31 — while filming the 2002 movie Minority Report with Cruise.
• He had asked production not to schedule him that day. They scheduled him anyway. For 6 AM.
• He had partied the night before, showed up in rough shape, and decided to push through instead of calling off.
• In a decision he now calls a clear mistake, he tried to steady himself by asking for six Pacifico beers and a pack of Reds. He admits he even had a couple before cameras rolled. Shockingly, that did not help.

What followed was, in his words, one of the worst days he has ever had on a set. He got jammed on the very first line of the scene — and stayed jammed.

"I'm sure you've all grasped the fundamental paradox of pre-crime methodology."

That was the opener he could not get out clean. Crew members quietly suggested he step outside, grab some air, reset. He refused, figuring disappearing and then coming back would just make the pressure worse. So they kept rolling. And rolling. And rolling. They did 46 takes.

As you might imagine, Tom Cruise was not thrilled. Farrell put it simply: Tom, who he says he loves, was not happy with him that day.

How he looks at it now

Farrell, now the guy under the prosthetics in The Penguin, did not sugarcoat any of it. He called the whole thing terrible, said it absolutely was not cool, and noted that two years later he went to rehab. The story lands like a confession and a cautionary tale — with the added, slightly insane detail that the scene-killer was a line about the 'fundamental paradox of pre-crime methodology.' Only Hollywood could make that the tongue-twister that breaks a birthday.