This story contains spoilers about Sugar series 1.
I’ve seen Colin Farrell go from “lusty leprechaun” to Hollywood royalty, and I was there for all of it.
As one of the editors at Heat magazine in the early 2000s, I had a front-row seat to the Colin Farrell show, and it was, week after week, absolutely unmissable. Except it wasn’t a show; it was just his life.
At Heat, we had a simple, unspoken test for whether someone deserved to appear on the cover – were they unpredictable enough that you genuinely didn’t know what they were going to do next? Colin Farrell wasn’t necessarily on every cover, but he was never far from the magazine. There always seemed to be another story or photo emerging.
That’s because the celebrities who broke through back then weren’t polished, they were porous. You saw mistakes, mess, impulsiveness. They felt like real people rather than carefully managed brands.
