Irish actor Colin Farrell has been living in the United States for more than two decades, but he says he has not lost the ability to observe his surroundings from the point of view of an immigrant, something that, as he said in an interview with EFE, “has been essential to play John Sugar”.
The alien detective is the main character in ‘Sugar,’ the Apple TV series that begins its second season next Tuesday and which the actor describes as one of “the projects closest to his heart.”
“You can say that we have in common that of being ‘the other’, the outsider,” said Farrell when presenting in Miami this second installment of the series of which he is also executive producer.
“I still have enough of that myself, as a 49-year-old immigrant man, or someone who has made his home and raised two children in Los Angeles for the last 20 to 25 years,” he said.
The actor, born in Dublin in 1976, says he retains “that curiosity and that sense of wonder, and also sometimes disappointment, sadness at what I see around me in the world”.
That feeling also connects him to that private detective with an air of classic Hollywood cinema who hides his alien status. In the first season, premiered in 2024, a human trafficking case was intertwined with the mystery of who or what Sugar was.
In this one, the protagonist is a bit disappointed. “He’s not as happy, he’s not as naive, he’s not as in awe of human beings. He’s a little bit disgusted with us,” Farrell explained.
Sugar now investigates the disappearance of a boxer’s brother and continues to search for answers about his own missing sister. The case drags him into a wider conspiracy in Los Angeles and moral dilemmas that he can no longer solve alone as an observer. Plus, he is alone; the team of aliens he arrived on Earth with is gone.
Colin Farrel on ‘Sugar’ series: A more complex character
For Farrell, the character has become more complex because he begins to discover that violence is not just something he encounters in others: “It’s not an abstraction. It’s something he feels a compulsion toward and doesn’t understand why.”
That tension separates him from another of his recent characters, Oz Cobb, the gangster from ‘The Penguin’, the HBO series derived from ‘The Batman’ universe.
Farrell won the Golden Globe for that performance, in which he appears almost unrecognizable, with prosthetics and makeup, to embody a criminal rising in the Gotham underworld.
“Violence is comfortable for Oz. I don’t mean he enjoys it, but it’s something he seems to innately understand. Sugar, on the other hand, experiences violence as a reaction born out of fear and confusion, not as a tool to accumulate power,” he explains.
“If Sugar commits an act of violence, he commits it against himself. With Oz, not so much,” the actor added, describing the difference between a nihilistic villain and a still compassionate detective.
The sequel also moves away from the glitz of Los Angeles. “In the first season there was a lot around Hollywood, the studio system and those big, beautiful houses in Bel Air and Beverly Hills. This one moved away from that and went a little more into the shadows,” he detailed.
They involve immigrants, Latinos, human trafficking and a less photographed city. It was necessary to show “all aspects” of the city, which is one of the characters in the series.
The actor also connected that sensitivity to his own life. The father of James and Henry, Farrell has spoken publicly about the experience of raising the former, who has Angelman Neurogenetic Syndrome, and in 2024 founded a foundation to support adults with intellectual disabilities and their families.
That intimate side seems to seep into Sugar, a character Farrell defines as “one of the sweetest” he has played, reported Agencia EFE.
Find out more at ‘QueOnnda.com’.
