You can assume one thing about an actor who chats unapologetically about his tangles with prostitutes, the celebrity images he masturbates to, drugs he's sampled, why he's happy about his foreskin and his best guess as to his co-star's sexual orientation: He's not an American. Colin Farrell is a straightforward Irish guy's guy -- he swears a lot, chainsmokes and is frighteningly generous when answering questions about his personal life and career. His performance as a hell-raising Vietnam recruit in Tigerland won comparisons to such badasses as Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. Now he's on-screen with Al Pacino in the CIA thriller The Recruit and plays the villain in Daredevil, a comicbook adaptation that pits him against Ben Affleck. He'll also be in Phone Booth, a controversial (and much-delayed) movie about a sniper.

Farrell, 26, is still the new kid in Hollywood, but he's already being paid a reported 8 million to star opposite Samuel L. Jackson in a red-blooded action flick based on the Seventies TV series SWAT.

Farrell worried his mother sick with his carousing, bombed out of school at 17, then lit out to Australia, wild and disorderly, for a year. He returned to Ireland for a stint in drama school but dropped out in 1997 when he won his first movie role in the made-Ireland drama Drinking Crude. By the following year, he was a homegrown TV sitcom hero on the hit Ballykissangel, which led to a small role in The War Zone, actor Tim Roth's 1999 directorial debut. In London, Kevin Spacey was so impressed with Farrell in a stage role as an autistic teen that he recommended him to the director of the 2000 film Ordinary Decent Criminal. That gig landed him an American agent and, soon after, the lead in Joel Schumacher's Tigerland and the WWII prison camp movie Hart's War, in which he starred as a lieutenant alongside Bruce Willis. Many reviewers said he stole the show from Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report last summer.

We sent Stephen Rebello to meet Farrell for drinks at his hotel in Santa Monica to find out how he's adjusting to being the "next big thing."