‘It’s like fencing with a close friend. Terrifying in a lovely way’: Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton on taking a gamble with their new drama

The actors star in Edward Berger’s woozy casino film Ballad of a Small Player. Amid the opulence of a Macau hotel, they talk risk, addiction and Fabergé eggs

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. The haughty bird basks in the attention of onlookers as it rotates on a diamond-encrusted perch to the triumphant sound of clarions, before returning to its shell. 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 about ghosts, guilt and gambling. 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, where he clings to a precarious life of enervated luxury. Having fled to Macau with a stolen fortune, he whiles away his nights betting at baccarat, a high-stakes game of chance no more complex than a coin toss. 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.