Taking a gamble

Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton talk risk, addiction and Fabergé eggs on the set of their casino film Ballad of a Small Player

- 

On a humid morning in Macau, a blue-and-orange phoenix embellished with more than 60,000 flowers is hatching from an enormous pink Fabergé egg in the lobby of the Wynn Palace hotel. Chancing upon this spectacle, you think to yourself, “How lucky that I was passing at that precise moment!” Stick around and you will be disabused of your sense of good fortune: the hatching occurs every 15 minutes without fail.

It is summer 2024, and Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton are guests here while shooting Ballad of a Small Player, directed by Edward Berger (Conclave) and based on Lawrence Osborne's clammy 2014 novel. Farrell plays Brendan Reilly, an Irish thief who affects an English accent, goes by the name Lord Doyle and hides out at the Wynn Palace. Having fled to Macau with a stolen fortune, he whiles away his nights betting at baccarat, a high-stakes game of chance. Swinton is the gauche investigator, also labouring under dual identities (one minute she's Betty, the next Cynthia), who has been hired to find Reilly and retrieve the loot.

“The place is a bit of a headfuck,” says Farrell. “Kind of like living inside that giant Fabergé egg.” He is referring to the hotel, which reserves for its casino's high-rollers an entire wing of elite accommodation. When I am shown around one of these opulent villas, which features in the movie and has its own private hairdressing salon, massage room, outdoor pool and butlers' quarters, I feel as if I'm being waterboarded with Dom Pérignon.