So it's not a fluke: Vanity Fair really does seem to have set aside one summer issue, each year, to damn some young, up-and-coming actor with excessive praise. It's not terribly surprising that the editors have singled out the almost-famous Colin Farrell to adorn the cover of the July 2002 issue; those of us who consume a hefty helping of the entertainment press have been hearing about Farrell since he starred in Tigerland back in 2000. The only question is why it's taken them so long to elevate Farrell to the position of (doomed) cover boy.

Given the tone of most VF cover profiles, the Farrell story has an unexpected edge; author Ned Zeman even flirts with acid. Rather than being a fawning portrait of a fascinating character that we, the reader, should come to love the way the magazine does, the Colin Farrell that emerges from the article is kind of a douchebag -- and not only that, but also one undeserving of the position in which he's found himself.

For one thing, there's Farrell's role as Hollywood's Official Second Choice. He won his role in Hart's War when Edward Norton dropped out. Lather, rinse, and repeat with Minority Report and Matt Damon, and with Phone Booth and Jim Carrey. Surely this must happen in movies all the time -- that one star leaves a project and another steps in -- yet Farrell's luck (or shamelessness) in gobbling up the scraps that fall from more-established stars' plates seems to keep popping up in nearly every story about him.

For another, Zeman describes in some details Farrell's "laddish" attributes; when the story opens, Farrell has awakened "on the sofa only minutes ago, having failed once again to reach his own bed." Farrell is twenty-six years old, and rich, and single, and has no kids, and is Irish, so what the hell, right? Why shouldn't he get completely shit-faced several nights in a row? Why should he even bother to fake it as a teetotaller while a visiting journalist is in town? Farrell's public deserves to see his true self, do they not? And obviously the editors of Vanity Fair are impressed enough by Farrell's image as a scrappy, drunken, Irish lout that they've styled him, for their photo shoot, as a big spender surrounded by Las Vegas showgirls, and elsewhere as a shirtless boxer, the better for us readers to associate Farrell with such swaggering, manly pursuits.

Even as he contributes to the Farrell mythmaking, Zeman peppers throughout the article little hints that Farrell's persona is not entirely authentic. Castleknock, the town outside Dublin where Farrell grew up, is "new-money suburban," and the house in which he spent his childhood "a large, modern place." Which is not to say that wealthy children raised in comfortable circumstances can't grow up to be scrappy, drunken louts -- merely that his privileged upbringing doesn't seem to be something Farrell wants spread around. This bit of backstory makes Farrell's Kerouac-ian blather about his "fuckin' demons," and his assertion that all he needs to be happy is a "packet of smokes and a few pints," ring just a little false -- or if not false, exactly, then at least calculated and effortful. Finally, just in case we hadn't picked up on his subtler clues, Zeman makes it plain in the third last paragraph of the article:

His edge, his ferocious Irishness, is definitely Farrell's thing. "Colin has an accent now which he never had," says [Farrell's brother] Eamon, who speaks in clear, seamless sentences. "He used to speak like me until he got to America. He has this Irish, Irish brogue of an accent. Every time I go over to the States, it's stronger. I can hardly understand him sometimes." ...Sometimes, Farrell agrees, he does milk the whole Irish thing. "I wear it on my sleeve," he says. "I'm definitely so aware of being Irish over in America. So aware of it. Sometimes I come out of fuckin' meetings and I'm so fuckin' glad I'm Irish." ...Every time Farrell flies over the green hills of Ireland, his family says, he cries. When he lands, he kisses the ground.

Perhaps all of Farrell's mannerisms are entirely sincere. Or perhaps he's trying to distinguish himself from all the peers with whose rejected jobs he has thus far built his career by creating a niche for a scrappy, drunken, Irish lout, and then making sure he's the only person who can fill it.

In the article, Zeman compares Farrell to Brad Pitt not once, not twice, but thrice; the first two instances seem complimentary, but the third time Pitt's name is invoked, it's as if Zeman is trying to tell Farrell, "You, sir, are no Brad Pitt." However the roles came to him, Farrell's had several opportunities to fulfill the potential we keep being told he has; none of them has panned out so far. (We admire Zeman's having published a celebrity profile in Vanity Fair in which he states that at least two of the subject's movies -- Tigerland and Hart's War -- have been complete flops.) It's unlikely that Farrell's next film, Minority Report, will follow suit, though given that Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise also participated in the project, the film's inevitable success won't have much to do with Farrell's star power. Phone Booth and The Recruit will be the real tests as to whether Farrell will ever land another VF cover; at this stage, it seems likely he won't.

So that'll just about do it this year. There but for the grace of Graydon Carter go Mark Ruffalo and Jake Gyllenhaal, but hey -- there's always next year.