Why broken friendships hit home for 'Banshees of Inisherin' stars Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson

While filming the dark comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin” last year, Irish stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson would often pass each other on a Saturday morning after the work week – Farrell on a run, Gleeson on a bike ride – and stop for a quick chat.

But what would have happened if Farrell had shown up to work Monday and refused to do a scene with Gleeson, or vice versa? Living an isolated existence on a pair of Irish isles and telling a different sort of civil war tale in their new movie reminded them of how interconnected we all are – and how it can go bad quickly.

“You get lost amidst the throng very easily in major cities. Somewhere like this, an island like (in the movie) or a small town in America, you're bouncing off each other all the time. There's no way out. You're sharing life on the daily. And so I felt that very much,” Farrell says.

“If that (relationship) sunders, then it means the ripples go throughout the island,” Gleeson adds. “Very few people are left unscathed.”

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Rancor is unleashed and sides are taken when a tight-knit friendship suddenly goes south in the bleak yet funny “Banshees” (in theaters and streaming on HBO Max). On a remote isle off the coast of Ireland in 1923, Pádraic (Farrell) arrives at the local pub for his daily afternoon pint with best pal Colm (Gleeson), who orders him to sit somewhere else and gives him the cold shoulder.

Hurt, Pádraic asks him what's happened.

“I just don’t like you no more,” Colm says matter-of-factly, leaving the talkative younger man at a loss for words. Over the next few days, Pádraic tries to mend fences, Colm rebuffs him – he’d rather be writing fiddle tunes, or anything else, than listen to his former buddy's “aimless chatting.” Pádraic doesn't give up and grows even more desperate, Colm threatens to cut off his fingers if he doesn't stop bugging him, and the situation veers out of control for both men.

“We've all been on either side – or both sides – of the breakup thing,” says writer/director Martin McDonagh (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”). “Hopefully, it's a universal type of story, even though it's set in a very Irish context. So far, people seem to have tapped into it and connected to it in that way.”

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While writing the screenplay, McDonagh revisited his emotional splits: Like Pádraic, “I just get hurt and sad,” the filmmaker says. “Thankfully, I can channel it into a script.” (Things are going OK for him now: His current partner is Emmy-winning "Fleabag" writer/actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge.)

When he first read "Banshees," Farrell was struck by the aloneness “inflicted” upon his character by the friends' breakup. “It's one thing to need moments of solitude in your life, but when you have no choice and a community turns against you, the thought of that is just horrifying to me,” he says.

For Gleeson, “there's no real convention to discuss or to deal with this kind of thing when it's outside of the romantic field,” the actor says. “It's a platonic relationship that is basic and formative in the way that you see the world that's over. There's no real structure for that to be explored socially.”

Farrell, 46, admits that he’s experienced the “dissolution of romantic relationships,” but says he’s “never been in something with a friend that was as sudden and as severe and as clearly defined, and also was confusing – confounding, ultimately" as what happens to Pádraic.

Gleeson, 67, has been on both sides of the dynamic. “I remember I had a thing where somebody turns out to not be the person who I thought they were, and I find that quite devastating,” he says. “I had a fight with somebody that soured a relationship that meant a lot to me. There was a certain amount of unrecognized grief going on with me. It didn't settle. I kept trying to say, ‘Is there any way I could fix it?’ You realize in the cold light of day that this is not going to happen. It's not nice.”

Nowadays, Gleeson doesn’t try to “repair” a fractured friendship as he might have in the past: “There's a little bit of an acceptance that, look, if it's gone, it’s gone.”

Farrell adds, “Broken things once had meaning,” and Gleeson agrees. “It's a little bit like a play. It happened, then it's gone. Not to say it wasn't great and beautiful at the time, but you don't want to relive that all the time.”

And Farrell has figured out in recent years that “loss is a huge aspect of this human experience that we all have to contend with. The older you get, the more you lose loved ones, the more you contemplate the loss of loved ones, the more you contemplate the loss of your own life, ultimately.

“I’ll just say three words: still in process.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Banshees of Inisherin' Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson on bad breakups