Trivia / What Richard Did

• The Cast Showoff: Sam Keeley gives a very good rendition of Tá mo chleamhnas ‘a dhéanamh.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Jack Reynor gained weight as filming went on, to show Richard's lack of control over himself after the incident.
• Real-Life Relative: Lenny Abrahamson cast his father Max Abrahamson, a leading Irish lawyer, as the lecturer.
• Star-Making Role: Jack Reynor was pretty much unknown before this, with just two films and a couple of shorts to his resume. He became a star almost overnight - getting roles in films like Transformers: Age of Extinction, A Royal Night Out, Macbeth and headlining the 2016 film Sing Street.
• Throw It In!: Appropriately for a movie about teenagers in a transitional period, there is more improvisation than in Lenny Abrahamson's other movies. Lara's visualisation game was something Roisín Murphy played with Jack Reynor on the crew bus one day on the way to shooting that got incorporated, and Richard's story about drowning his pet hamster in a shot glass was actually Reynor telling an anecdote while the cameras were being set up. The “DMC” scene was cut down from a much longer “guided improvisation” session, where Abrahamson would call out a topic and the boys would riff on it. Richard's confession to his father also wasn't planned (or at least decided on) until shooting.
• What Could Have Been: Jake wasn't in the original script. Patrick Gibson's audition was so good that they created the character just to have him in the film.

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