Trivia / Country Strong

• Actor-Shared Background: Chiles parents are revealed to have served time in prison. Leighton Meester was in the same situation.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: Leighton Meester's "Summer Girl" is better remembered than the film.
• Dueling Movies: With Crazy Heart.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Tim McGraw, a successful country singer, is the only one of the four leads who does not sing in the film.
• Method Acting:
  • Garrett Hedlund actually stayed in Tim McGraw's ranch and had guitar rehearsals there so he could fully immerse himself in the mindset of a country singer.
  • Both Garret Hedlund and Gwyneth Paltrow learned to play guitar and trained their voices for the film, so as not to rely on doubles.
• Missing Trailer Scene: A music video for the song "Summer Girl" contains a few shots of Chiles performing in the bar that don't appear in the final film. She's shown only performing the end of the song in the actual scene.
• Reality Subtext:
  • Beau was based off country singer Hayes Carll, who ended up writing most of his songs in the film.
  • Leighton Meester was also in the process of releasing her first album, giving her a few parallels to Chiles.
• Star-Derailing Role: The successive failures of this movie, Monte Carlo (2011) and That's My Boy ended any chance Leighton Meester had at becoming a bankable Hollywood star. She has found a little more success as a singer.

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