In her new memoir, The Woman in Me, Britney Spears details a brief fling she had with the actor Colin Farrell in the early 2000s. The pair met while Farrell was filming the movie S.W.A.T., following Spears’s very public breakup with Justin Timberlake. Writing that Timberlake slept with “six or seven girls” in the weeks after they “officially” ended their relationship, Spears says she was still torn up about her ex. “He was a girl’s dream. I was in love with him.”
To try and move on from the relationship, Spears writes that she decided it was time to start dating again and was set up with Farrell through a “club promoter friend.” They connected, she visited him on the set of his movie, and the pair “had a two-week brawl,” Spears writes in the book, a copy of which was obtained by TIME ahead of its Oct. 24 release. “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.”
When they attended the premiere of Farrell’s 2003 movie The Recruit, Spears recalls that she was not fully over Timberlake. “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.”
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At that premiere, Farrell told reporters that their relationship was casual. “We’re not dating. She’s a sweet, sweet girl. There’s nothing going on—just mates,” he said at the time. Entertainment Weekly reported that Spears left the event “as soon as the paparazzi were gone.”
Later that year, Spears spoke to W Magazine about the brief relationship, saying, “Yes, I kissed him… He’s the cutest, hottest thing in the world—wooh!… But it was nothing serious.”
She doesn’t detail the end of her relationship with Farrell in The Woman in Me, except to say that “for a brief moment in time, I did think there could be something there. The disappointments in my romantic life were just one part of how isolated I became. I felt so awkward all the time.”
