Colin Farrell stars as a factory worker who’d rather have real memories of a super-spy, in Columbia Pictures‘ new action-adventure “Total Recall.” He turns to Rekall, a futuristic company that can turn your dreams into real memories. But when the procedure goes horribly wrong, Quaid becomes a hunted man.
The line between fantasy and reality gets blurred and the fate of his world hangs in the balance as Quaid discovers his true identity, his true love, and his true fate.
“It was very important that Quaid is just an ordinary guy,” producer Toby Jaffe says. “Colin just brings a real genius to him as an actor. There’s a likeability onscreen that you just feel he’s a real guy who could be a real factory worker.”
“It’s a common story, a man who feels that he isn’t living the life he should be living – a man experiencing some discontent with his lot in life,” says Colin Farrell. “But he gets a rude awakening, which is that he really isn’t living the life he should be living. Quaid has no idea who he is, beyond a deeply cellular or emotional level. The whole movie is him trying to figure out who is the real Quaid.”
“I really wanted to get more involved in Quaid’s experience,” Len Wiseman explains. “I mean, imagine: you wake up, you go about your life and you inherently feel like a good guy… All of a sudden, everybody around you starts telling you that you’re a bad guy. What do you do?”
With that in mind, Colin Farrell approached the role as a battle between emotional and intellectual and tried to maintain that balance. “It brings up issues of identity, ego, and super-ego – it’s fun to wade into that psychological pond a bit,” he says.
As part of his development of the character, Colin Farrell did some unusual things – including sleeping overnight in the Quaid Apartment set. “I just wanted to see what it was like to have an evening and then wake up in the morning in that space,” he says. “It was lovely, actually.”
“Colin really dedicated himself to this character,” says producer Neal H. Moritz. “He’s in just about every scene. There were many days that he was standing in the rain all day long, wet as can be, and still, every day after filming he’d either go to yoga or lift weights.”
Whenever possible, Colin Farrell performed his own stunts. The actor worked closely with stunt coordinator Andy Gill (“Fast Five”) and fight coordinator Jeff Imada (“The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1”). “You get schooled when you come to work with them,” he says. “You get practical lessons that you’d never need to learn, if you weren’t doing this job.”