Colin Farrell didn’t have a great time filming Thirteen Lives.
“Terrifying, in a word. Terrifying,” the Irish actor told Entertainment Tonight at the film’s premiere Thursday night while describing the experience, reported Page Six.
The Ron Howard-directed movie recounts the real-life 2018 rescue of a dozen young boys and their football coach who were trapped in the flooded Tham Luang cave in Thailand.
Farrell, 46, confessed to feeling particularly frightened filming extreme underwater scenes.
“It was scary. I’m not a great swimmer anyway, not that we were swimming, not that we were treading water — we had to stay on the surface — but they built a really impressive network of caves,” the In Bruges star shared.
“It was about four or five different caves that were based on the topography of the caves, the Tham Luang caves in Thailand, and they filled them full of water, and we’d go down and there was no up.”
Farrell, who plays rescue diver John Volanthen, added that not being able to see the water’s surface was horrifying and “just wreaks havoc on [the] mind.” He even shared that he experienced panic attacks underwater, which he called a “new experience.”
However, the True Detective alum explained that all the underwater scenes did not improve his aquatic abilities, adding that being a rescue diver is “a very particular skill set.”
Farrell was not the only star on set who struggled with the intense scenes.
His co-star Viggo Mortensen, who plays real-life hero Richard Stanton, shared that he, too, panicked at one point while filming.
“All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe,” the Green Book star, 63, told People. “It seemed like a long time, but it was only a matter of seconds. I panicked.”
Although he managed to remember his training and switch the mouthpiece to the oxygen tank, Mortensen acknowledged that “it’s not that complicated, but at the moment, it’s hard to think clearly.”
The movie also stars Joel Edgerton, Tom Bateman and Paul Gleeson.
Thirteen Lives is on Amazon Prime Video from Friday, August 5.
This article originally appeared on Page Six and was reproduced here with permission
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