EXCLUSIVE: Colin Farrell is teaming up with producer Lee Magiday (The Favourite) and Hopscotch Features on a screen adaptation of Irish crime novel The Ruin, which marks the first project for Farrell’s new production company Chapel Place Productions.

Irish writer Dervla McTiernan’s well-received thriller, set in Galway, follows detective Cormac Reilly as he is thrown back into a case from 20 years before involving two children whose mother died of an overdose. Through the eyes of the detective we see into dark corners of Ireland including police corruption and abuses in the church.

Film and TV outfit Chapel Place, which Farrell will run with his sister Claudine, is developing and producing the project with Magiday’s fledgling outfit Sleeper Films and Australia’s Hopscotch Features. Cast has yet to be set.

The movie reunites Farrell with former Element Pictures executive Magiday with whom he worked on Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster.

The Ruin was McTiernan’s debut novel and is the first in the ‘Cormac Reilly’ series. It has been published in the U.S., the UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, where it was a top ten best-seller. McTiernan followed the book up with its sequel, The Scholar, which was published in March 2019. The latest novel in the series, The Good Turn, will be published in 2020.

Troy Lum (The Water Diviner) of Hopscotch said of the project, “We’re thrilled to be bringing Dervla’s page-turning novel to the screen, and we couldn’t have better partners than Lee, Claudine and Colin. We all responded so strongly to the material, which is driven by a richly authentic protagonist – detective Cormac Reilly – and set in the unique beauty of the west coast of Ireland”.

Magiday added, “I’m excited to be working with Troy and Andrew and teaming up again with Colin and Claudine on such thought-provoking material. The Ruin is a brilliant debut – Dervla has created an atmospheric, resonant and intricately woven story with deeply affecting characters. It offers an intimate and compelling view of Galway, a city driven by its history.”

In Bruges and True Detective star Farrell has movies Voyagers, Eve and The Gentlemen in post-production and TV series The North Water due to shoot soon.

McTiernan is repped by The Story Factory.