29/10/2012 - Norwegian director Erik Poppe adds Irish musician-actor Larry Mullen Jr and actress Maria Doyle Kennedy to the team for his new film, which started principal photography in Dublin last week

When Norwegian director Erik Poppe arrived at Dublin to prepare for the shoot of his fourth feature, A Thousand Times Good Night, he "wanted a surprise in the movie – something fresh and raw". The 'surprise' joined French actress Juliette Binoche and Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau on the set, when principal photography started last week (October 22) - Irish U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr.

"A legendary musician, but how would an established artist work as an actor? He may claim this is outside his zone of comfort, but it is a pleasure to see how he becomes safer and safer, and how he getsinto the role, filming during the day and working on U2's new album at night," Poppe enthused.

Also Irish actress Maria Doyle Kennedy, with her renowned debut in UK director Alan Parker's The Commitments (1991), who was most recently in Downtown Abbey (2011) and The Tudors (2007-10), has been cast in the €5.4 million drama of a woman photographer who is torn between the job she feels as a vocation and the family she loves so much.

Binoche and Coster-Waldau play the photographer and her husband, Mullen Jr – whose first film role was in Irish director Mary McGuckian's The Man From the Train [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2011) – and Kennedy are their best friends. Scripted by Norwegian writer Harald Rosenløw Eeg, it will mainly be filmed in Dublin and Morocco, with detours to Kenya and Afghanistan, for Norwegian producer Finn Gjerdrum's Paradox.

Co-produced by Ireland's Newgrange Pictures Ltd and Zentropa Sweden, A Thousand Times Good Night will be released domestically in autumn 2013 by Norway's Euforia Film - Poppe's previous feature was De usynlige (Troubled Water) [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2008), concluding his Oslo trilogy.