Colin Farrell Talks Alexander

The Mirror spoke with Colin Farrell about his new role in Oliver Stone's Alexander:

Alexander The Great could make him a superstar - and that's a prospect he relishes.

"The film is huge," he says. "I've been working on it for three or four weeks and it's very intense. There's a lot of reading, horse work, sword work, shield work and a lot of studying tactics and strategy. It's an incredible script."

HIS preparations, however, have not been altogether smooth. Peeking out from underneath his beige woollen cap at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills is a mop of newly dyed blond hair.

"It's blond because I'm a d***head," he said bluntly. "I went into a chemist's and bought a four-dollar tin of blond dye and this is what happened. Now I'm waiting for it to grow out."

He will get around �10million for Alexander - twice what he was paid for his most recent film, S.W.A.T. In this he stars with Samuel L Jackson as a member of an elite team trying to deliver an international mobster safely into the hands of the FBI.

It is, he says, the first "purely popcorn" film he has made. "Boys and toys, man. Playing cops and robbers."

For research, he went out with police officers in "dodgy" parts of Los Angeles, spent a day at a police station and went to "S.W.A.T school" to learn to fire weapons.

"Here I am, getting paid a lot of money to get out there and play the kinds of games I did when I was a kid," he says. "I went out on the range and shot M-4 carbines, .45 handguns, 9mms, shotguns and learnt how to hit targets on the run. It was great fun."

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