Colin Farrell didn’t have a good time on the set of ‘Thirteen Lives’.
“Scary in a word. Scary,” the Irish actor he told “Entertainment Tonight” at the film’s premiere Thursday night while describing the experience.
The Ron Howard-directed film recounts the real-life 2018 rescue of a dozen young boys and their soccer coach trapped in the flooded Tham Luang cave in Thailand.
Farrell, 46, admitted he felt particularly intimidated filming extreme underwater scenes.
“It was terrifying. I’m not a great swimmer anyway, not that we were swimming, not that we were treading water — we had to stay afloat — but they built a really impressive cave network,” the “Batman” star shared.
“It was about four or five different caves based on the topography of the caves, the Tham Luang caves in Thailand, and they filled them with water, and we’d go down and there was nothing above.”
Farrell, who plays rescue diver John Volanthen, added that not being able to see the surface of the water was terrifying and “just wreaks havoc [the] mind.” He even shared that he experienced panic attacks underwater, which he called a “new experience.”
However, the “True Detective” alum explained that all the underwater scenes didn’t improve his water skills, adding that being a rescue diver is “a very special skill set.”
Pharrell wasn’t the only star on set to struggle with the intense scenes.
His co-star Viggo Mortensen, who plays real-life hero Richard Stanton, shared that he too panicked at one point during filming.
“Suddenly I couldn’t breathe,” the “Green Paper” star, 63, she told People Thursday. “It seemed like a long time, but it was only a matter of seconds. I panicked.”
Although he was able to remember his training and change the mouthpiece on the oxygen tank, Mortensen admitted that “it’s not that complicated, but right now it’s hard to think clearly.”
The film, which also stars Joel Edgerton, Tom Bateman and Paul Gleeson, is in theaters now and will be released on Amazon Prime Video on August 5.
