So is it true they cut out your nude scene in A Home At The End Of The World because your member was, um, too distracting?
Aah, the famous cock shot! [Laughs.] I heard that when they first started screening the film these girls were yelling and carrying on at that point, so they felt it was too distracting. So it did get cut eventually. But I shot it like that because I felt it was right for the character and the scene. It's about this threesome between him, this guy and this girl. No one was telling me, 'Don't do it,' or, 'Go for it.'
Here's Bobby, my character, in the scene and what does it tell you, seeing Colin Farrell's cock? It tells you that he's naked. He gets out of bed with his lover Claire [played by Robin Wright Penn] and he goes to Jonathan's bedroom to see him, because he's concerned. And he doesn't have the savvy to realise that Jonathan's madly in love with him. He's too innocent. So he doesn't even have the respect to put jocks on. He just lies in bed with Jonathan naked. So that's the point of the whole scene, and it was just felt that the cock shot got in the way, so to speak. So they cut something uncut. [Laughs.]
He's a real free spirit and open to anything sexually. How much of you is in Bobby?
There's definitely some of me. When you start on a film you're trying to create a character and you pick from various aspects of life – either stuff you've gone through or you've seen other people go through or observed. But with this it wasn't anything I've seen or observed in adults so much – it was children I've seen, infants. That's what Bobby's like. He's this big kid, so it wasn't about adding on, but tearing away and stripping down and going back to being a child again. He's so un-fully formed, but he's also more formed than the rest of us.
And now I have a boy of my own, I was thinking a lot about that, about how babies are. We're all born perfect, aren't we? Then you get messed up and learn bad habits and learn all about envy and jealousy and pride and suspicion. And then you worry about success and ambition, and through that you forget passion. Ambition's nothing to do with passion. You can't equate the two. You can be passionate about ambition, but you can't be ambitious about passion, and you forget that. And Bobby has a passion for living in the moment, which he doesn't even realise. He's so unaware of all the things that I, as a pseudo-intellectual sitting in a bar talking to people about analysing life, go on about. He isn't even aware of all that. He just does it and lives life the way a lot of us would like to live it. And when Claire says to him, 'You could do anything,' he says, 'Anything but be alone,' and that's the truth.
