Lord of the Dance
Irish actor Colin Farrell looks completely unrecognisable in gripping new drama The North Water
Entertainment

Irish actor Colin Farrell looks completely unrecognisable in gripping new drama The North Water

PHOTOS have appeared of Colin Farrell in the upcoming BBC drama The North Water and he looks almost completely unrecognisable.

Sporting a grizzly beard and a scraggly long hair, the Irish actor has demonstrated yet another chameleon-like transformation, after being cast as Penguin in The Batman last year.

The North Water, based on Ian McGuire's novel of the same name, follows a group of weathered, brutish whalers sailing the Arctic Ocean hunting harvest whales during the 1850s.

Farrell plays Henry Drax, a pipe-smoking harpooner with a seedy, criminal past whose amorality has been shaped to fit the harshness of his world.

Looking at the pictures, it's fair to say, he looks the part!

Drax sets off on his whaling expedition to the Arctic with Patrick Sumner (Jack O'Connell) and Captain Brownlee (Stephen Graham).

"Hoping to escape the horrors of his past, Sumner finds himself on an ill-fated journey with a crew psychopath. In search of redemption, his story becomes a harsh struggle for survival in the Arctic wasteland," the description reads.

(Pic: BBC)

"As the true purpose of the expedition becomes clear, confrontation between the two men erupts, taking them on a journey far from solid ground and beyond the safe moorings of civilisation."

The series is set in Hull and on the ice floes of the Arctic in the late 1850s, where shooting took place on the frozen seas north of the Svalbard archipelago.

It's understood that the crew travelled as far as 81 degrees north to film sequences in the pack ice, the furthest point north it is believed a drama series has ever filmed.

As the true purpose of the expedition becomes clear, confrontation between the two men erupts, taking them on a journey far from solid ground and beyond the safe moorings of civilisation.

The series is set in Hull and on the ice floes of the Arctic in the late 1850s, where shooting took place on the frozen seas north of the Svalbard archipelago.

The North Water will air on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer this autumn.