Jack Reynor has revealed he took Toni Collette on a night out to the Guinness Storehouse to welcome her to Dublin and the set of their new film Glassland.

The Transformers: Age Of Extinction star plays John, a young lad who must ignore his dreams of going travelling with his mates to stay at home and care for his alcoholic mother, played by Toni.

Jack revealed: “She came out for four-and-a-half shooting days, and that was all we had with her, and she found it very challenging, which I think anybody would. She came by herself and she was there for two days before she started to shoot.

Jack Reynor and Toni Collette play mother and son in Glassland (Element Pictures)
Jack Reynor and Toni Collette play mother and son in Glassland (Element Pictures)

“And I went out with her, I brought her to the Guinness Storehouse and I made her stay in and drink lots of Guinness with me. The best thing to do before making a film about alcoholism! But she was really at ease with me.”

He added: “I already felt a very strong connection with her from watching the films that she played mother in when I was a kid. I was really struck by them, and I felt the relationship she had with her kids in those films, kind of mirrored my own relationship with my mother.”

The 23-year-old actor – whose mother is a human rights defender – admitted making the indie film, set in Ireland, had been a very personal experience for him.

(Element Pictures)
(Element Pictures)

Jack said: “It’s set in a much more familiar side of Dublin society to me than my previous Irish films. When I was growing up there certainly wasn’t a lot of affluence in my family and we came from a bit more of a working class background.

“Also addiction is something that’s rampant in many Irish families, and it’s something that I certainly experienced in my family as well.

“Not to mention the relationship between the mother and the son is very intense, and I myself have quite an intense relationship with my crazy mother. So it was a very, very personal film for me.”

Glassland, which also stars Will Poulter and was written and directed by Gerard Barrett, is released in cinemas on Friday April 17.