The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
The Banshees of Inisherin
How director Martin McDonagh made an Irish tragicomedy with the help of Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and an emotional support donkey
It was in the small courtyard of a house in Galway on the west coast of Ireland that arguably the most important audition for The Banshees of Inisherin took place.
After a casting call had been put out across the country, on one grayish morning in late 2020 — a full year before shooting started — a trailer pulled up with four aspiring young hopefuls in the back. Writer-director Martin McDonagh, director of photography Ben Davis and production designer Mark Tildesley — who had been living together under lockdown while prepping for Searchlight’s period tragicomedy about a friendship gone awry on the fictional island of Inisherin in 1923 — went outside to inspect.
As the four budding screen performers were paraded around, McDonagh spotted his star instantly.
“She just stood out. There was just something about her,” the director recalls. “I don’t know if it was her eyes, which were almost perfectly oval. … It almost looked like she had eyeliner on. But her sensibility was just perfect.”
There was no point trying to change his mind. “They were all really cute, but Martin was adamant,” says Davis.
And so, despite having zero acting experience, Jenny the miniature donkey was cast on the spot to play the barely waist-high best friend of Colin Farrell’s lovable simpleton Pádraic (and his four-legged soulmate when his human BFF and drinking buddy, Brendan Gleeson’s Colm, decides to abruptly end their relationship). As it turned out, McDonagh had named her Jenny in the script.
“So it was fate,” says Tildesley. “It had to be her.”
The film’s other main (human) roles were far more straightforward to cast.
McDonagh had always known he wanted to reunite Farrell and Gleeson since their first pairing in his darkly comic 2008 breakout, In Bruges, and had actually sent them a very early incarnation of the Banshees script in 2015, before his hit Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which garnered seven Oscar nominations and won two tropies in 2018.
The original Banshees script “was a lot more plot-driven — there were shootouts, and there were more characters,” says Farrell. The actor “loved it,” but McDonagh did not (Gleeson also says he had reservations, mostly about his character not having an
“awful lot to explore”). McDonagh mentally binned the project, picking it up again in late 2019.
“I reread the first few pages, and they were actually good,” he says, “but then it goes to shit, so I chucked all the crap out and just wrote it from scratch.” He kept the Irish Civil War as a backdrop, but moved it off Inisherin; the war now takes place solely on the mainland across the water.
It was around the time of revisiting his old script that McDonagh discussed the idea over dinner in London with Kerry Condon, who had been a regular collaborator and friend since 2001, when she made her debut at age 17 in the first production of his stage play The Lieutenant of Inishmore. As someone who had “loved his Irish plays the most,” Condon says she encouraged McDonagh to dive further into Banshees and make it his next film.
In the end, no audition was necessary — he created the role of Siobhán, Pádraic’s caring but sharply cynical (and somewhat less donkey-loving) sister, for her. “I’d always wanted to write something that would allow her to show just how brilliant she is, and how brilliant she was when I saw her all those years ago,” McDonagh says. Having also appeared in a 2009 production of his play The Cripple of Inishmaan, Condon is now, with Banshees, the only performer to have completed McDonagh’s Aran Islands trilogy. (The real-life Aran Islands are Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer.)
Although McDonagh had never worked with Barry Keoghan before, he also wrote a role specifically for him: the troubled and hapless Dominic.
After three weeks of rehearsals in Galway (poetically, in the Druid Theatre, where McDonagh put on his early plays and where photos of a young Condon are still on the walls; “It was a lovely full circle,” says Farrell), in August 2021 the cast took the short boat ride over to Inishmore to kick off an eight-week shoot. Locations on Inishmore and on the island of Achill, about two hours up the Irish coast, would be knitted together to become the film’s beautifully bleak Inisherin, a melancholic and sparsely populated land littered with isolated coves and beaches, imposing rocks and lush greens. Everything in Banshees was shot across these two locations.
By the time they arrived on Inishmore, Davis and Tildesley had already been prepping for several weeks. Tildesley — teaming with McDonagh for the first time (a scheduling clash prevented him from working on
In Bruges and he says he’d been “badgering” producer Graham Broadbent for another opportunity since) — claimed it “rained throughout the build period,” only for Mother Nature to turn on the charm, in quite spectacular fashion, in time for the cameras. “The sunrises and sunsets were extraordinary,” says Gleeson
(who does recall one day of bad weather, when “the whole North Atlantic shat on us”).
It was on Inishmore where they erected, from scratch, Pádraic and Siobhán’s small farmhouse, while on Achill they used an old whaling cottage for Colm’s home (building a shell over the top that they could burn down for one key scene without damaging the original — “the owner was slightly anxious,” recalls Tildesley).
Nearby, on the parking lot of a beauty spot on Ireland’s famed Wild Atlantic Way scenic route, Banshees’ all-important pub — where Colm and Pádraic’s doomed relationship is laid bare — was built, a construction that