First Look: Colin Farrell Falls for Margot Robbie in ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’

Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie were both looking for some magic.

Each of them had recently made the biggest projects of their careers. Robbie’s was Barbie, the $1.4 billion blockbuster hit that earned eight Oscar nominations. Farrell’s was The Penguin, the gritty HBO series in which he transformed (with about three hours a day of prosthetics and makeup) into Gotham City’s infamous villain.

They followed up those two iconic characters with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, an original romance about two strangers taken on an unexpected journey. “Going from The Penguin to this was quite simply stepping from the darkness into the light,” Farrell tells Vanity Fair. “As amazing as it was to work on The Penguin, that story was all about trauma and its various articulations and calcifications. This film is all about letting go of trauma—moving past it.”

Though Robbie had produced other projects in the interim, she hadn’t stepped in front of a camera since making Barbie in 2022. “I think that’s the longest break I’ve ever had between jobs. I thought it would be more scary to be walking onto the Big Bold set on day one, but it wasn’t,” she says. “Everything about this film was immediately comfortable.”

That comfort came from the story—and from director Kogonada, who was also looking to go on a big journey with his next movie. After two critically acclaimed projects—2017’s Columbus and 2021’s After Yang—and a few years of TV work, he was ready to take on a different sort of project. “I was looking for something a little bit larger and lighter,” he says. “I’m a big fan of comedy and romance, but I wanted it in a kind of original context.”

Then Seth Reiss’s script for A Big Bold Beautiful Journey landed on his desk. It was a sweeping and emotional tale following Sarah and David, who, after connecting at a wedding, are cosmicly brought together and shown doorways to their memories. (Watch the trailer below). “This film is really about reckoning with your past in order to find the possibility of love in the present,” says Kogonada. “What do you have to reckon with in order to truly connect with other people? And I think as you get older, you realize your past has everything to do with how you understand love in the present.”

Sony will release A Big Bold Beautiful Journey in theaters on September 19. With a supporting cast that includes Lily Rabe, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the film aims to take audiences on an emotional ride—just as it did its two lead actors. “If audiences feel even a tiny slice of how magical it felt making this movie, then they’ll have the most incredible experience in the theater,” says Robbie. “Making this movie was truly one of the most magical experiences of my life.”

Reiss’s script reminded Kogonada of romantic dramedies from the likes of Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment) and Ernst Lubitsch (Heaven Can Wait). “We’re always longing for connection and understanding,” he says. “It’s always something as human beings that we are searching for.”

His earlier films had centered on that longing for connection in different ways. In his meditative directorial debut, 2017’s Columbus, two strangers (John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson) wander around that city’s architectural marvels while sharing truths about their lives and their relationships to their parents. His follow-up, the 2021 film After Yang, starred Farell and Jodie Turner-Smith as parents whose android son malfunctions. While futuristic in nature, the film grapples with complex ideas about family, grief, and loss. It was another critical hit and won an award at the Sundance Film Festival.

He’s a soulful filmmaker who is known for his visual style, capturing a world that feels both familiar and completely unique. And while A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a more expansive canvas than his first films, it’s centered on the same deeply relatable desire for connection.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey features a magical realism that Kogonada says was partly inspired by his love of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films. “That sort of magical lightness really connects you to our everyday experiences and all the challenges of being human, and is able to do both things at once,” he says. The Truman Show was another reference. “I think about a movie like that: exploring so many levels, but really inviting and enjoyable. The dream, if you’re going to make a film like this, is to thread the needle—to do something that has artistic integrity but invites everyone to the table.”

Because David’s past is such a large part of the story, Kogonada needed a leading man who could carry that sort of history with him. He thought of Farrell early on. “Colin is always carrying it in his eyes. You just feel like, Oh, he has endured pain, he’s endured victories in his life,” the director says. And Farrell also has the requisite soulfulness and charm. “There’s something inherently romantic about him as well. He’s a poet by nature. There’s just something about him that I think makes everyone sort of fall in love with him a bit.”

For Farrell, it felt like A Big Bold Beautiful Journey picked up a conversation that he and Kogonada had begun while working together on After Yang. “Much of the same issues of loneliness and the confounding feelings around the absence of love and companionship in a person’s life are approached here too, but in a wholly different context,” says Farrell.

Kogonada had never worked with Robbie, and didn’t personally know her. Still, when he met with her to discuss the project, he was immediately struck by her prowess and passion. “She’s truly a generational talent. I say that not just as an actor. This is what makes her really special: I genuinely think if she was just a producer, she would be one of the best producers to ever produce in Hollywood,” says Kogonada. “I think she’s that smart, that savvy.”

The trio spent two weeks rehearsing before filming began, a process that hadn’t traditionally been a part of Kogonada’s process before this film. “We spoke about everything; the script, life, films we love, people we know, experiences we’ve had and how they changed us,” says Robbie. She and Farrell also bonded on drives in Farrell’s car, mirroring what happens in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey: David’s GPS instructs him to pick up Sarah and drive them together to places where they discover the doorways that lead them to their past. “It really created a vibe that bled into the film once we started shooting.”

Filming in spring 2024 in Los Angeles, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey allows audiences to step into one unexpected world after the other. Kogonada reunited with After Yang cinematographer Benjamin Loeb to create the film’s beautiful visuals, and brought on Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, who is known for his work on Miyazaki’s films, for the score. “It felt important to lean into the fantastic, but to also ground it in these landscapes,” he says. “Our desire was to create a world that was both inviting and surprising, so it wasn’t just picturesque for the sake of it.” He references Miyazaki’s visuals once again as inspiration. “You could just look at any of those images—sometimes they’re just clouds and they feel like there’s magic underneath it,” he says. “We were talking quite a bit about where do we point the camera and how do we point it so we always have those elements that are both grounded and capture what about our world is inherently magical.”

It had been several years since Kogonada had been on a film set of his own. He had purposefully spent time directing TV series—Apple TV+’s Pachinko and Star Wars series The Acolyte—as a way to explore filmmaking techniques and equipment on bigger budget productions. That helped him prepare for A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. But even with all that preparation, he admits it was still a steep learning curve. “I really genuinely could spend a whole day telling you why I’ve learned. It’s been humbling in a great way, in the way that you realize there’s so much more that I need to understand and know about the medium,” he says. “And it is exciting too, because it did expand my own palette for this kind of filmmaking.”

Robbie and Farrell say that the experience changed them as well. Says Farrell, “We all arrived with open hearts. It was just easy. Just sharing our lives and our experiences, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows. Not to make it sound like a therapy session, but it was just an amazing experience that changed me for the better.”

Watch the new trailer below: