Britney Spears has opened up about her brief fling with actor Colin Farrell in her new memoir, The Woman in Me.
Per Time, Spears recalled that she met Farrell for the first time while he was filming the 2003 movie S.W.A.T., which was in production around the time of Spears’ breakup with Justin Timberlake. She suggested that her ex slept with “six or seven girls” in the weeks following the “official” end of their relationship, but she was still “in love with him” and not fully over the breakup. She decided to give dating another go and connected with Farrell through a “club promoter friend.”
The 41-year-old popstar and 47-year-old Academy Award-nominated actor—who had something of a reputation as a heartbreaker at the time—met on the set of S.W.A.T. and quickly hit it off. As she put it, they engaged in “a two-week brawl.”
“Brawl is the only word for it—we were all over each other, grappling so passionately it was like we were in a street fight,” she wrote in the book. They went public when they attended the premiere of his movie The Recruit. “As I had before when I’d felt too attached to a man, I tried to convince myself in every way that it was not a big deal, that we were just having fun, that in this case, I was vulnerable because I wasn’t over Justin yet,” she continued.
At the premiere, the two stressed that what they had was casual, though. “We’re not dating,” Farrell told reporters. “She’s a sweet, sweet girl. There’s nothing going on, [we’re] just mates.” As reported by Entertainment Weekly, Spears left the premiere shortly after the paparazzi did. Later that same year, Spears described Farrell as “the cutest, hottest thing in the world,” but reiterated it was “nothing serious” between them.
While she didn’t detail what came of their fling, she did add that she thought, at least “for a brief moment in time,” that there “could be something there” between them. “The disappointments in my romantic life were just one part of how isolated I became,” she wrote. “I felt so awkward all the time.”
In another recently released excerpt from the book, Spears said Timberlake got her pregnant during their relationship but told her they were “way too young” for a child. “It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy,” Spears wrote. “I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated. But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”
Ultimately, she had an abortion. “If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” she added. “And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”
Spears’ memoir The Woman in Me, published by Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books, is scheduled to release on Oct. 24.
