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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.”
Keoghan was so committed to the film that he agreed to give up almost his entire Christmas break in 2025 between shooting Sam Mendes’ all-star The Beatles biopics, coming to Dublin to film for six days straight (as Bartlett notes, “without breaks”).
But landing almost directly from The Beatles set did mean he arrived looking rather like Ringo Starr, sporting a thick Fab Four mop-top. And due to him having to report back on set a week later, it was hair Bartley couldn’t lay a finger on.
“I could live with the longer hair, but my big concern was that he’d have sideburns and a handlebar moustache, and you can’t imagine a key worker rocking up like that!” she says. “Thankfully he didn’t. But there is definitely a touch of Ringo in some shots.”
While it had never been Bartley’s intention (she admits she had no idea about Keoghan’s upbringing before starting on “Lemonade”), the parallels between specific story details and Keoghan’s own — including how he looked out for his own younger brother and a relationship with a particular social worker who strived to keep them together — often felt almost too improbable.
“I think it was the first time he had worked on something that was so close to the bone for him and also allowed him to work through these things that he’d forgotten about. A lot of stuff started coming back to him while we were shooting. It was a lovely experience and just kind of felt like it was meant to be.”
As for Keoghan himself, he tells Variety via Bartley that working on the feature gave him a “beautiful sense of closure and understanding of the care system a little more.”
One element of “Lemonade” struck an even more personal chord.
The image of foxes is scattered throughout the film, symbolically used to represent the younger brother of Brophy’s character’s (“And for no real reason other than I used foxes and find them really mystical,” says Bartley). But when she first met Keoghan, he asked: “How did you know about the fox?” As it happens, after his mother passed away when he was a child, he had decided that she’d come back as a fox. “And he has always kept that — and that was probably the most emotional he got each time we talked about it,” recalls Bartley, who said that a fox even showed up on set one night.
“So there were all these strange, touching and magical little moments that we couldn’t quite believe,” she says.
There was also a rather delightful coincidence with the film’s lead Brophy, who was from the same inner city Dublin neighborhood as Keoghan, had also been a young amateur boxer and had idolized the star growing up (some people had mocked his early ambition by asking “Who do you want to be, the next Barry Keoghan?”). Years earlier, Brophy had actually messaged Keoghan on Instagram, saying that he wanted to follow in his footsteps and become an actor. Keoghan, not averse to sliding into the DMs of filmmakers he admires himself, replied.
“So when we first auditioned [Brophy], we didn’t mention that Barry was involved, and when he found out it was unbelievable, a full circle moment for him,” says Bartley.
There was one script change made to accommodate Keoghan. Originally, a line about famous people who had been fostered had two names as options: Barry Keoghan and John Lennon. It was a line Bartley forgot was in there when she first sent it to the actor.
“So obviously when Barry first read it, he got a great laugh out of that — but it was embarrassing as it looked like I was trying to convince him to join the film!”
Naturally, in the final script, they went for Lennon, meaning that anyone now watching “Lemonade” may presume the line is a little meta reference to the films Keoghan was making at the same time — not to mention his hair.
“Lemonade” premieres in Toronto on Sep. 12.
See an exclusive clip from “Lemonade” below
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