Casting BAFTA winner and Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan in Irish indie feature “Lemonade” was surprising straightforward, but did come with one key demand: Do not touch his hair.
This was the strict stipulation given to filmmaker Kim Bartley when making her narrative feature debut, a deeply compassionate and emotional film following a Dublin teenage boy (played by fast-rising Irish star Lewis Brophy) forced out of the foster care system and trying to make ends meet while reuniting his family. But it was one she was absolutely willing to follow to land Keoghan in a crucial supporting role as a social worker.
A documentary maker turning to drama for the first time (“Lemonade” actually started out as an unscripted project), Bartley had discovered Keoghan’s own history as a foster kid in Dublin while in development, and reached out to the actor in the hope that the subject might pique enough interest for him to add some Hollywood star-power as an exec producer. But it did much more than that.
“I never dreamed of asking him to act in it, because I’d never made a drama before and it was such as small budget,” she explains. “So I sent the script through to ask if he would exec produce and he came back and said: ‘I’ll exec produce it if you let me play that part.’ It was amazing.”
