Colin Farrell on ‘Sugar’ Season 2 and How Hard it is to Be Human: “The World is a Really Cruel Place”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a long list of actors that have embodied the range of roles Colin Farrell has over the past year-plus.

From playing an oversized and ruthless crime boss on The Penguin to the struggling, down-on-his luck gambler in Ballad of a Small Player to a charming and love-struck stranger who finds love and romance with Margot Robbie in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, the only thing Farrell hasn’t turned out is a slapstick comedy. He’s easily forgiven for that as he’s been getting serious with more work. This year will find him slipping back into familiar shoes as John Sugar in the second season of Apple TV’s Sugar.

It’s also a gig that delivered a surprise twist during the first season — spoiler alert! — when it was revealed that the private investigator is actually an extra terrestrial being. There’s more surprises ahead as Farrell teased Tuesday during Apple TV’s inaugural press day at Santa Monica’s Barker Hanger. Seated alongside his longtime best friend and new Sugar co-star Shea Whigham, Farrell covered his love for playing John Sugar, the love he shares with Sugar for the city of Los Angeles and how they advance the whole alien plot device.

“I just love playing this character,” Farrell admitted. “I love Los Angeles. It took me a while to fall in love with the city, but over the last 23 years of living here, I have grown to love it more and more and more. It never makes sense to me as a city; it’s so multifaceted, it’s so cross cultural. If you want to be a surfer, you can be a surfer, an economist, a rocker, an artist, a graffiti artist.”

Later, when asked by Whigham, whom he meet while filming Joel Schumacher’s Tigerland back in the day, specifically what he loves most about playing John Sugar, Farrell reflected on the troubled times.

“I want to set out a qualifier: I say this is someone who’s very aware of all the good fortune that I’ve had in my life, and I know what my life looks like, and I know what it’s like, of course, to be inside of it. Having said that, the world is a really cruel place, and it’s tricky being a human being and try to process what we see around us and the divisions,” Farrell explained. “None of this is left, right, up, down. It’s hard sometimes to see the amount of cruelty that is pretty prevalent in our global community.”

He then turned his attention back to John Sugar. “Sugar gets involved in violence. That’s one of the things that he questions about himself, particularly. The questioning is pretty heavy this season, but evermore, he just believes in the fundamental decency of human beings. I don’t know that I share that belief all the time. I touch it sometimes, but to play a character that even if he’s shaky in that belief, that belief is always there, even if he questions his own goodness, his belief in the potential decency of humanity is always really front and center. And that’s a lovely, lovely character without, I hope, him being vanilla and just going around high-fiving everyone he knows. He knows life is tough, but he believes in the decency of human beings, and that’s OK.”

As for the sci-fi of it all, he acknowledged that the creative team wrestled with how best to tackle the alien elements. “It was more to protect ourselves and also to test ourselves within the realm of the human drama of the show by believing that the show should be able to stand alone without any of the other worldly aspects to it,” he noted. “Sugar, really, he’s just a device. He’s a being from a distant land who comes to experience what it is to be a human being. Through that we get to explore what it is to be a human being, all the rage, all the anger, all the stuff that we see that doesn’t work and that is horrifying. But sugar, for my money — and this is one of the things I love most about the show — he is always angling towards optimism and angling towards the beauty that he sees in human beings.”

In terms of looking ahead to plot points of season two, Farrell said Sugar continues his private investigator duties by juggling cases, including one involving two immigrants from Korea as one has gone missing. “But there are multiple cases. That’s the kind of primary case, and then there’s also the quest to try and find out what happened to his sister,” he said, adding that Sugar continues to live his life aloe in a way that he believes he might be the only type of his species on the planet.

Also, viewers should expect more love for the city of L.A. “Most shows and most films, some that are even set here, take place elsewhere. So, to shoot on the streets of LA and have it as a character in [the show] was something that drew me back and got me just as excited about the second year as I was about the first [season].”

Sugar’s season two debuts on Apple TV on June 19.