Colin Farrell doesn’t have many ‘true friends.’ But Brendan Gleeson is one.
They’ve known each other since grade school, the older man a former classmate from the University of Southern California, the younger one a writer for the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. And in the early 1990s, their connection turned into something more.
Now they share more of an intimate relationship. After Gleeson graduated from the University of Missouri in 1988, Farrell asked him to write a piece about him for a college newspaper, only to learn three days later that he had been accepted at UC Berkeley. In 1995, the two men were spotted in a bar together and decided to call themselves ‘friends,’ and, according to Farrell, Gleeson still remembers that night as the day he began to realize what they had in common.
‘He was always telling me funny and witty things or saying his least favorite words and I was always trying to make him laugh, but somehow we never managed to,’ Gleeson told the Los Angeles Times back in April. ‘Finally, I figured out we didn’t have any mutual friends, but we both loved jazz. I told him I got a girlfriend and was going to have to break it off, and he said, “Well, you’re breaking it off. We’re going to write a song about it.”‘
The two have been collaborating on musical theater, podcasting, film scripts and film essays and are currently co-hosting a weekly podcast called ‘Culture is Weird’ where Gleeson plays a character called John Smitten. At least one person on the internet has mistaken Gleeson and Farrell as a couple and started a petition to get Farrell a gay marriage.
While they may have kept their relationship secret from the outside world for years, the two are now officially a couple. It doesn’t seem like Gleeson is ready to publicly declare his love for Farrell just yet, but Farrell told the Times that he has always known Gleeson was his ‘foremost fan.’
‘To be honest Colin and I have been kind of a couple for years,’ he said in April. ‘It felt right to have a relationship when I saw a photo of us and it felt right to make it official.’
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