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.
“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.
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.
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