Making of ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’: How Martin McDonagh Landed His Dream Cast (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 quartet of 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 so-called 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 had to be weighted down to stop the strong ocean winds from blowing it away (the production didn’t have permission to dig into the ground). The new drinking house proved to be a major hit with the locals, who would come in and actually be served beer by the crew, and were reportedly upset when it was dismantled — like all the builds — at the end of the shoot.

While Achill was connected to the mainland by a bridge, the boat route to Inishmore created some unique logistical issues. “Everything had to come over on this tiny roll-on, roll-off ferry, so we could only get a very limited amount of equipment onto the island,” says Davis, who’s marking his third film with McDonagh, after Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards. Because of limited accommodations, they could bring only a very small crew. Davis notes that “the stripped-down nature” of the film was one of the things he “enjoyed the most.”

Transportation issues on Inishmore actually led to one key piece of casting. With cars unable to be brought over, most travel on the island was done via bikes or horse-drawn carts. Tildesley recalls a “wonderful old man” giving them a lift one day in his cart, pulled by a glorious local white horse. He sent a photo to McDonagh, and the horse was quickly cast as Minnie, Pádraic’s trusty steed used to deliver milk to the village (Farrell claims he had a “couple of lessons” before handling Minnie, although McDonagh suggests the actor’s experience from Oliver Stone’s biopic Alexander had taught him to be a good horseman).

Another farm animal was used for Pádraic’s milking cow — seen, alongside Minnie, peering sorrowfully through the window into his cottage — with Tildesley saying that a whisperer was hired to keep her calm: “He got some local cows and would just lay in the field every day and talk to them.”

For Colm’s trusty dog, rarely far from his side, they ended up casting Morse, the border collie owned by Rita Moloney, the donkey animal handler. “That dog was very well trained,” claims Gleeson. (Farrell suggests that his donkey had “never had a day’s training in her life.”)

While animals have featured in several of McDonagh’s film (most notably an abundance of white rabbits in Seven Psychopaths), in Banshees he truly embraced his love of nature. The director says that Terrence Malick’s farm-set period romance Days of Heaven was one of his “touchstones,” while Davis and Tildesley note that Charles Laughton’s classic Night of the Hunter was obsessed over while they were prepping in lockdown; the famed moonlit river scene featuring an array of creatures became a specific point of reference.

Banshees‘ broad spectrum of wildlife also perfectly reflected the local landscape. “On Inishmore, particularly, every field you’d pass there was a donkey or horse or a couple of cows — there were just animals everywhere, and it’s such an integral part of life there,” says Farrell, who recalls living in a cottage that had a horse in a field next door and greeting it each morning and evening (both he and Gleeson praise their time living on the island as lending to an “extraordinary” sensation of being “always on set”).

But Farrell’s love of the animals didn’t necessarily mean the animals loved the actor. “They all had a go at me at some point,” he exclaims.

Across the duration of the shoot, Farrell was bitten by Morse the dog (“I think he had to have a tetanus jab,” says McDonagh), almost had his cart reversed off a cliff into the Atlantic by Minnie the horse, and was given a solid kick in the knee by Jenny the donkey, to the extent that he nearly went back to the mainland for a scan. “She really did me proper!” says the actor. For potential DVD bonus features, both the donkey kick and dog bite reportedly were caught on film.

Not that Farrell takes any of it personally. “They’re brilliant because they’re honest,” he says. “You know you’re shooting honesty when you’re pointing the camera toward animals.”

And it wasn’t just the main cast of farmyard friends that had cameras pointed toward them. During prep and after work on shooting days, Davis would head out across Inishmore and film the local wildlife, a fair chunk of which would end up in the final cut, providing unscripted natural- history interludes between scenes. Davis says he soon realized that if McDonagh was to select one of his shots, “it probably had to have an animal in it.”

The director was often on the lookout for potential subjects himself, on one afternoon ringing his cinematographer because he’d seen a pair of wild goats up the road (a delightful twosome that also served as one of several unplanned metaphors for the film’s central storyline). McDonagh’s girlfriend Phoebe Waller-Bridge was visiting at the time, so the three went out during sunset to track them down. “I remember us climbing over these walls, and we found these two goats — and I just love that shot,” says Davis.

Editor Mikkel G. Nielsen, working from his suite in Copenhagen, took this footage and weaved it between the dialogue scenes to help “create the island,” and to give “us as an audience a chance to contemplate.” An Oscar winner for his work on Sound of Metal, Nielsen was drafted in for Banshees at the very last minute when McDonagh’s regular collaborator, the noted Brit editor Jon Gregory (renowned for his decades of work with Mike Leigh) sadly passed away after a short illness just as shooting had started. “He loved Westerns, and he loved the West of Ireland, so it’s a shame that he didn’t get to see it,” says McDonagh, who dedicated the film to Gregory. 

Nielsen, who says he knew it was a “delicate situation,” flew to Ireland — his solitary visit — where he met the director and was introduced to his “very sad, beautiful film,” which he immediately found a connection to. 

“Coming from this small country of Denmark, I could easily connect to the idea of being distant, and the feeling of being on an island and looking at the world from afar.” One of his main goals, he says, was to make both Inisherin and its animals characters in the film alongside the cast. 

And the film’s most important animal was its donkey, of course, and Jenny’s comfort was so paramount that an emotional support donkey — Rosie — was hired so the main star wasn’t overwhelmed by the filming experience. Shipped over from England, Rosie would be just off-camera for every one of Jenny’s scenes. “Because otherwise she’d get discombobulated,” notes Davis. Gleeson jokes that the two donkeys “now travel together on American Airlines.”

Even with Rosie on hand, Condon says they still had to be “quiet and gentle” around Jenny, whose inability to follow the script meant they had to be “constantly ready” to change their performances depending on what she did or didn’t do. “She didn’t take direction well and had a mind of her own,” adds McDonagh, who claims many of Jenny’s more improvised moments — such as wandering around Pádraic’s cottage instead of sitting beside him — ended up looking so natural and charming that they were used in the film.

The extra attention paid to Jenny continued into postproduction. Nielsen says one of the more difficult decisions was choosing the precise sound for the little bell she wore around her neck, often heard just before she trots into the frame. “We were so deliberate and precise about how it should be, to the extent that it becomes part of her personality, almost like dialogue,” he says. “And then suddenly they’re connected, so if it changes and it becomes more high-pitched, it’s like … that’s not Jenny!” McDonagh says they went through a “lot of shit bells” before homing in on their final choice.

But what of Banshees‘ diminutive four-legged scene-stealer now? Has Jenny taken advantage of her 15 minutes to line up more prestige gigs? Actually, quite the opposite: Banshees is set to be her solitary IMDb credit. After the shoot, McDonagh paid for Jenny to take an early retirement, and she now enjoys a life of luxury among other miniature donkeys in a pasture in central Ireland. “I saw a photo of her the other day, and she’s filled out,” says Condon. “She’s not such a little girl anymore!”

Adds McDonagh: “We all fell in love with her and it was the least we could do. We just didn’t want her to be doing any shit films.”

This story first appeared in the Jan. 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.