Killing Bono

“BONO! BONO!” “Me, Bono! “Bono – over here!” “Please, Bono!” “Bono, me!” “Bono!” “Hey, Bono!” “Bono!!!” “BONO!!!”

Discotheque! It’s the night of the launch party for The Joshua Tree and a large crowd of frenzied U2 fans are screaming to catch their idol’s attention as he strides confidently into a Dublin nightclub. Wearing dark shades and a cowboy hat, the mullet-haired rock star whispers something into his beautiful female companion’s ear before obligingly stopping to sign some autographs.
Unnoticed by anybody, a bloody and bedraggled looking gatecrasher in a torn t-shirt and long brown leather coat approaches the back of the crowd. It’s former Hot Press journalist Neil McCormick, an old classmate of Bono’s in Mount Temple, and now a struggling musician with a series of failures behind him. Bleeding from a deep gash over his right eye, he looks dazed and confused – but also completely consumed with envy at his friend’s stellar success. Realising that their career paths are polar opposites, he pulls a pistol from his coat pocket and bitterly aims it at the singer’s head...
“And... CUT!”

Dominating the room like an army general, director Nick Hamm seems like a man who knows exactly what he wants – and how he wants it. “Listen, boys and girls,” he broadcasts to the gathered throng, “I need you to hold the albums up higher. We’ll take a minute and then go again.”
Needless to say, this isn’t actually the Joshua Tree launch party. In fact, it’s not even Dublin. It’s February, 2010, and, in a plush Belfast nightclub, Hamm (who has previously directed Keira Knightley in the acclaimed 2001 psychological thriller The Hole and Robert De Niro in Godsend) and his crew are entering the fifth week of shooting the movie Killing Bono – an Irish musical comedy loosely based on Neil McCormick’s 2004 memoir, I Was Bono’s Doppelganger.
The book tells the story of McCormick’s relationship with U2 and Bono in particular, playing off the enormous disparity between the mega success of his famous friends and the catastrophes which bedevilled his own music career.
A pupil at Mount Temple Comprehensive at the same time as the members of U2, Neil set out on what he hoped would be the road to stardom at more or less the same time. The book draws its humour from the torture doubly inflicted on McCormick, watching his old school friends conquering the world as his own musical dreams crashed and burned. Doppelganger’s tagline says it all: “Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. Some have greatness thrust upon them. And some have the misfortune to go to school with Bono.”
The €3 million budget film, which is being funded by Northern Ireland Screen, with help from Invest NI, stars Ben Barnes, Robert Sheehan, Pete Postlethwaite and Krysten Ritter. Barnes, who plays Neil McCormick, is, of course, a big star, best known for playing Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian as well as the lead role in Dorian Gray. And Sheehan – originally from Portlaoise – is only marginally behind in the box office stakes. Having debuted in 2003’s Song For A Raggy Boy, this is his seventh feature film and he has also featured in TV hits like The Tudors and Misfits.
Postlethwaite has already finished his involvement, and Ritter – who plays Neil McCormick’s partner, Gloria – isn’t needed on set today. The party scenes are being shot in Cafe Vaudeville on Arthur Street in the city centre. There are original Joshua Tree posters and cardboard cut-outs all over the place and the hundred or so extras are all dressed like it’s 1987. As the cast and crew take a breather, Hamm – a large, imposing figure in his mid-fifties – takes a moment to talk to Hot Press and explain what’s going on.
“We’re shooting the scene today where Neil McCormick comes in to the launch party of Joshua Tree, and he’s got a gun with him. And he’s deciding that his life is terrible – and he thinks that one of the ways that he might do something about it is if he puts a bullet through Bono. But, of course, then he decides that’s not the way to go about it. He’s also had a bad car crash so he’s a bit concussed.”
A lifelong U2 fan, Hamm snapped up the movie rights to Doppleganger as soon as the book came out. “I’ve been working on this film for more than five years,” he explains. “It took a long time, though, to get the script right because different script writers saw different things in the book, and different ways of telling the story.
“It’s a hard story to tell,” he adds. “The challenge is to find a way to balance the comedy and the emotion. I used the book as a kind of source material. I didn’t tell the story of the book because the book is a series of incidents, and that wouldn’t make a movie.”
Given that McCormick is a former alumnus of Hot Press, the magazine inevitably features in the movie. “Yeah, it’s very important to me to have Hot Press involved in the whole thing,” Hamm says. “Hot Press was a very big part of that whole genesis of Irish music. It’s a seminal magazine and newspaper, that’s been world renowned, and it’s very important for us, and the movie, to have that authenticity and give the movie a sense of veracity. And also to support Hot Press. So I have cast Niall Stokes really well.
“The shoot’s going very well,” he adds. “We’re about two weeks away from finishing filming. We’ve got four weeks done, so we’ve broken the back of it – and as you can hear we are racing to get the scene.”
With that, he claps his hands and yells, “Okay, darlings, let’s try it again!”

Several takes later, during yet another break, Ben Barnes comes over to say hello. The 29-year-old Londoner greets Hot Press in a flawless Irish accent.
“I kind of have to stay in the accent while I’m shooting, because otherwise it just goes out the window,” he explains. “I did find it hard at first. I had a couple of sessions with a dialect coach, and then I was kind of panicking a little bit, and then I just made a decision to stay in the accent for six weeks. And it has helped to no end, because now if they change a line, or whatever, I don’t have to go up to someone and say, ‘How would I say that?’ because I’ve been talking like that all day.”
Did you hang out in Dublin to prepare?
“No, I desperately wanted to, but it just came on so fast. I’m just back from filming the new Narnia movie. But luckily, I have been surrounded by Irish actors – in the young band that we start with, Robert Sheehan, who is playing my brother, is with me in most scenes; and we’ve got all these fantastic Irish actors coming in doing these cameos, so I’ve been surrounded by Irish accents.”
Barnes has a realistic looking gash over his right eye and the clothes he’s wearing are ripped and dirty.
“Just before this scene, I tried to break into The Factory where Bono was rehearsing because he has promised that we can support them at Croke Park,” he explains. “And I’ve said to him on the phone that we don’t want to because we’ve got our own gig going. It’s 500 people, and he’s asked us to come and play in front of 50,000. But I’m so self-assured, and so focused on my own dream and taking my brother with me, that I’ve said that we’d rather play to 500 of our own fans than 50,000 of yours.
“And then, I basically make a string of mistakes and get kicked out of my own band, and come back to Dublin, and I’m leaving him messages going, ‘I’ve changed my mind. We think we should support you. There has been a terrible mistake. I’m really sorry’. So I’m looking for him to come and have him rectify the situation, but none of his bodyguards will let me through to him. And so I try to climb this barbed-wire fence to get to him, and one of his security pulls me off and he throws me in this… you know, bag of shit. And that’s why I’m covered in curry. And it sort of ripped my T-shirt open, and that’s why I’m such a mess.”
The real life Neil McCormick, now the Daily Telegraph’s music critic, is due on set for the very first time later today. Is Barnes nervous about meeting him?
“Well, all I can say is that I’m thoroughly enjoying playing my version of Neil. I have no idea if it’s anything like the real Neil McCormick – except that I’ve read the book a couple of times. I don’t mean this in any sort of derogatory way, but I’m not sure it really matters, because the book actually feels like one of those everyman stories, where anybody who has ever aspired to be a rock star, or an actor, or a painter, or a poet, or just famous for its own sake – anyone who has ever craved success and it hasn’t quite happened the way they wanted it to, or it hasn’t happened at all – it kind of feels to me like one of those stories.
“Which I think sets it apart from just a story about a band trying to make it, of which there are millions. And, you know, it’s a story about failure. And it’s a story about these two brothers who, in our story, are a joke. But in real-life probably were not quite so much of a joke because they did nearly get signed for real.”
Although U2 have no financial stake in the production, the band have granted permission for two of their songs to be used on the soundtrack (‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ and the previously unreleased ‘Street Mission’). The film will also feature original music from Castledawson singer/songwriter Joe Echo, which Barnes will be singing for real.
“Yeah, I spent a few days in studio just singing some of the tracks. We got his wonderful guy, Ciaran [Gribbin], whose stage name is Joe Echo, and he wrote all of the songs for the movie, except for the couple of covers that we do. And he is absolutely an astounding man, and a wonderful musician, a brilliant composer. And he wrote these brilliant songs – we used quite a lot of his lyrics. He’s got these very quirky, quite cool lyrics. He writes these songs about rape, and weird things, but makes them into pop songs.
“And so we’re using some of Neil’s lyrics, but I think it’s mostly original music by Joe Echo,” he adds. “Because it should be something fresh and new as well, with that Eighties feel, but still a new album. It’s something that should go along with the film. It should be a new soundtrack.”
As a former alumnus of Hot Press, the magazine was an integral part of Neil McCormick’s life story and features prominently in the movie. “We shot for about two or three days in our pretend Hot Press offices, and they were some of my favourite days,” Barnes enthuses. “There was a couple of brilliant actors from Dublin coming and working in the office, and I’d just always imagine that Neil would kind of stroll in and act like he’s the boss, and runs the place. You know, there was this goat downstairs… apparently there was a goat that used to be by the front door, and U2 memorabilia and posters everywhere, which drives Neil nuts, of course, because he went to school with Bono. But we had a blast filming those days. It was really cool, really fun.”
Ah yes, the infamous goat. Well strictly between you and me...

Laois-born actor Robert Sheehan – who plays Neil’s brother, Ivan – wanders over for a chat, looking every inch the Eighties pop star with his big hairstyle, curved lip and black leather trousers. “You’re from Hot Press, eh?” he says. “I do one scene in the Hot Press office, but sadly not with the goat. I wanted to work with the goat. You know there’s a goat involved?”
Thankfully, the Hot Press office goat was well before my time – although, as I was about to say a minute ago…
“Apparently, it’s based on real-life events,” he laughs, “a goat eating up copy in Hot Press. When I do get to stroke him, then my hand smells like shit for about six hours after, so I’m not doing that. Yeah, you know, I do one scene, and it’s great because it’s Hot Press offices again, another fabulous set design, completely chaotic with U2 posters all over the walls, nobody really that organised and in-charge. It looked great.”
Although he’s a U2 fan, 22-year-old Sheehan jokes that he was “age minus one” when Joshua Tree first came out.
“Fair play to Bono, though! They’ve allowed us to use this song, ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, possibly the quintessential U2 track, their most moving one in my opinion. And they gave it to us for zilch, you know.
“It’s used really well in the film. It’s Neil McCormick hearing this song, hearing everybody holding Bono in such massive reverence for this amazing new album, this amazing new track, and him going, ‘He still hasn’t found what he’s looking for? He’s got everything he fucking ever wanted!’ And, of course, he has to be told, ‘Listen, he’s got everything you ever wanted’. Actually, I’m just looking over your shoulder because the real Neil McCormick is in today, and I’m terrified that I’ll see him and we’ll make eye contact. Anyway… so yeah, fair play to U2 for giving us that. I think they’re champions of Ireland!”

When affable producer Isibeal Ballance announces that she has nine minutes of footage ready to roll on her laptop for Hot Press’s viewing pleasure, the actors all crowd eagerly around the screen. “We’ve only seen bits and pieces,” Sheehan explains.
Nine minutes later, they all look suitably impressed. While it’s impossible to tell at this early stage, Killing Bono certainly looks like it has the potential to be a great comedy movie. Some of the scenes are hilarious. In one, Ben Barnes is lying underneath a large breasted woman he’s just picked up in a London club. As she sweatily grinds and gyrates on top of him, she throws her ample bosoms back and he suddenly spots a poster of Bono on her bedroom wall. The look of utter disgust on his face is priceless.
There’s also a scene in which a pissed-off Paul McGuinness (played by 30-year-old Athlone actor Sam Corry) tells Neil in no uncertain terms that he’s missed his chance to support U2 at Croke Park.
Corry looks quietly pleased at his performance. “I’m not in that many scenes,” he says. “It’s almost like a glorified cameo. I mean, it wasn’t a big enough role, really, that I felt I could call Paul McGuinness up and say, ‘Listen, can I hang out with you for a few hours?”
Corry tells me he based his portrayal of McGuinness on just one short piece of YouTube footage.
“I wanted to find something that would let me establish him very quickly, so I looked him up on YouTube, and on the internet just to search and try and find material. I found a few clips of later stuff, but in the film he’s kind of a bit younger. So I only found one clip, and it was a thirty-second clip where himself and Bono are sitting at a press conference – they’ve just been told that they won an award, and Bono talks for thirty seconds. McGuinness says nothing, he just sits there motionless for the entire thing – I think his foot twitches for a couple of seconds. And then he just turns at one moment, and he just says, ‘You didn’t believe me when I told you’. And that’s all you get. But for me that was the basis of McGuinness. So I just tried not to move as much as possible. He has a few little things that he does that I picked up on. But for me that’s enough. I’ve seen other actors trying very, very precise imitations, and I’m not a fan of that kind of work.”
While the producers have requested that we play cat and mouse with the name of the actor finally chosen to play Bono, the mulleted actor (“I swear it’s a wig,” he says, “the person who actually grew this hair is probably long gone!”) is an absolute dead-ringer for the Joshua-era U2 singer.
“I can’t go into details,” ‘Bono’ tells me. “All I can say is that I’m in the film enough and it’s a great experience. I’m loving every minute of it, yeah.”
Did you have to study a lot of old Bono footage to perfect the part?
“I suppose I did,” he says. “Obviously I had to watch a lot of the guy, especially the earlier stuff, and basically get the essence of Bono as opposed to copying his every word and move. I thought that was the most important thing.”
He’s done a brilliant job. Truly, he is Bono’s doppelganger.

Shortly after 3pm, having just jetted in from London, a rather wary-looking Neil McCormick arrives onto the set (he’ll be filming a small cameo tomorrow). A tall, handsome and silver-haired man in his late forties, he doesn’t look like a ringer for Barnes. (Or is it vice versa?).
“It’s all very surreal,” he remarks, looking around at the small army of actors, extras and technicians all dedicated to putting his life story onto the big screen. “They’ve been sort of keeping me away, which I kind of understand. I take everything in my stride, always. I probably didn’t when I was that age, but I’ve learned. You know, a little bit of failure, that joy-ride will teach you to be a bit Zen about everything.
“But I had weird anxiety last night about coming here and being confronted with my younger self, and the fear that I might want to take my younger self aside and tell him a few home truths, and we end up having a bit of a Star Trek moment, where you step back into the portal of your own past, and I’m wondering if maybe I can change things now.”
McCormick still hasn’t actually met Barnes. “I haven’t met him, though I’m about to!” he says, looking mock-nervously around. “We did talk about this – Ben wanted to meet me and I wanted to meet him, obviously – you know, the guy that plays you. But then, it’s not like a biopic. In a biopic – you know, Bono is a real character in this, people know him, and the actor has to get him right, and has done a fucking incredible job. I see him walking around here and I see the younger Bono I used to know. But nobody knows who I am or cares. I’m just the catalyst, and the actor has to bring himself to it.
“Nick’s fear was that the actor would meet me and immediately start saying, ‘Well, he doesn’t talk with an Irish accent, so I’m not going to talk with an Irish accent’. But I’ve been in London for 27 years or something. And he did rather insult me, Nick did. He said, ‘You know that funny little thing you do with your mouth?’ And I said, ‘Yeah?’ Basically, only one side of my face seems to work. He said, ‘He’s going to start doing that, and the first two weeks of shooting I’m going to have him talking out of the side of his mouth’. So I said, ‘Fine, I’ll stay away’. So, because of that I didn’t meet him beforehand, and he’s got his performance together, and now I finally… I have the feeling that I’m going to walk in there and disrupt his concentration a little, when he sees the gap that exists between me and him. So it’s going to be interesting.”
McCormick certainly doesn’t have any complaints about Hamm’s casting Barnes to play him.
“I was talking about this with The Edge, and he was saying, ‘I want Brad Pitt to play me’. Everyone wants Brad Pitt to play them. Of course. But I’ve got Ben Barnes playing me. The only thing I was thinking was that he’s a bit too fucking handsome, because I figure that with my talent and his looks we could have really gone somewhere. I don’t think any record company would have been booting me out, looking like that.”
Unfortunately, the producers – wisely! – wouldn’t grant McCormick his biggest casting request. “I really wanted them to cast Colm Meaney as Bono,” he laughs. “That would’ve been the ultimate revenge!”
Has he discussed the movie with his old nemesis recently?
“Not recently. He has been very supportive throughout this process, as have U2 in general. I mean, he doesn’t know too much about it, and I think it’s best to keep it that way. Ha, ha!”
While he’s obviously thought about it a lot, McCormick is still trying to get his head around the concept of a movie being made about his own life.
“Embarking on this whole process is just kind of weird. I do think to myself, and I had thought to myself in the beginning, the book exists and that is going to stay there no matter what. And that if anybody wants to see what the story was from the inside of the story then they’re going to go back to the book, and nothing’s going to change in the book. But everything else is going to change, because if this film is successful – which is a big ‘if’, because who knows what happens with these things, they can come out and they can go straight to video, and they can disappear – but they seem to be doing an amazing job.
“I think it’s got a great script, it’s very funny, there’s a lot of energy, and Nick Hamm is doing a great job – but the weird thing for me is I’m not going to be me anymore. I wrote this book about being in the shadow of Bono, and I’m about to become a shadow of myself! People are going to think that I’m Ben Barnes!

“Mostly when somebody gets a biopic made it’s because they did something great, and they’re really famous,” he continues. “Few people are celebrated for being a loser, but that’s what I am being, and it’s a biopic of somebody who isn’t famous, so it doesn’t really matter, and the person on screen is going to become much more them, than me in real-life.”
Having previewed the scenes set in the old Hot Press offices, McCormick declares himself hugely impressed.
“I’ve seen some of the rushes, yeah – it was fantastic. Again, it’s funny because you’re looking… I watched some bits of footage, and you see bits of a street, and it’s not the street that I was actually on, and you sort of adjust – you see the flat that I’m supposed to live in, it’s not the flat I was actually living in, so it’s not like looking at your own memories, but the weird thing with Hot Press was it really felt like Hot Press, even though it was a different layout.
“And the guy who’s playing the editor – it’s effectively Niall Stokes, even though he doesn’t look like Niall, but he’s got the long hair and everything. He had his gravity and, you know, that was quite interesting. We were talking about Niall, early in the casting, and they had some comedy actors that were maybe going to play him, and they were really playing him for laughs, and I said, ‘You know, he’s not… you can’t play him like that… this guy was a serious dude, he was inspiring for everyone to be around, you know? You can’t put together a magazine like that if you’re a loser’. So, I liked what I saw of the Hot Press scenes. Yeah, it made me laugh.”

While McCormick nervously goes off to meet his thespian alter-ego, Hot Press mooches around the set for a while. Not much happens. Movie-making is a slow, painstaking business, and Hamm and his crew spend a lot of time adjusting lights and setting up shots, while Killing Bono co-producers Ian Flooks (U2’s agent for many years, and The Clash’s) and Piers Tempest wander around talking into mobiles.
Thirtysomething Yorkshire-born Tempest tells me that he has high hopes for Killing Bono. “This is a great concept for a film,” he says. “It’s based on a true story, but it’s something that kids will relate to everywhere, because it’s about wanting to be a rock star, which really ties in, slightly with the likes of X-Factor – except, well, it’s a real struggle, you know what I mean? And it’s a story of redemption as well, so you’ve got Neil finding himself. So, it had all the elements that should make a hit movie, basically.”
Well, chances are that every U2 fan in the world is going to want to see this film...
“Absolutely. And even for people who aren’t U2 fans, hopefully it’s still a story that will resonate with everyone.”
Was the casting difficult?
“Very. Very, very difficult. It’s a long process, because initially we started thinking it doesn’t matter if the actor who plays Neil can’t sing. So we looked and we looked, and then we thought, actually it does matter, because someone to really inhabit that role has to be able to sing. He has to really understand it and get it.
“And Ben Barnes came at us totally left field: he heard about the script and put himself on camera when he was shooting the Narnia movie in New Zealand. So he sent his audition to us, and we watched it and we just went, ‘He has got it’. I mean, he obviously understood it, he read the book and the script, and – he knows this – it was just a really seminal moment. It’s history, basically. It has run very, very well.
“And then Robbie Sheehan playing Ivan… I mean, Robbie is such a great actor. And just the dynamic between the two really works, and the core of the movie has been the relationship between the brothers. Basically, we get that right and I think we’ve made it.”

At 7pm, they’re still shooting the Joshua Tree launch party scene. “I hope you’ve not been too bored, Olaf,” Hamm apologises. “But this is a long process. We’re almost there, though. Tomorrow’s going to be even harder. We’re shooting a live show and there’s about 300 extras.”
Having had a long chat with Barnes, Neil McCormick seems in good, albeit understandably perplexed, form. “It was great, you know. I didn’t have a thing of, ‘I’m talking to myself’ – maybe because you don’t talk to yourself. But I met the guy playing Bono, and what is really weird, I keep on having to do a double-take because he looks so like him in character. I see him in the corner, and I’m going, ‘What the hell is Bono doing over there?’ There’s a little subliminal moment.
“But it was very nice meeting Ben because I got the fact that he is passionate about this, he gets it completely, which, you know, he’s playing his version of me. It was very quickly not weird. I’m quite keen not to disturb him. I feel like he’s creating his part, and I don’t want to come in and start sort of saying, ‘Yeah, but you know I used to limp?’ [laughs]. You know, and throw him off completely. It’s also nice to see myself with long hair again. I loved my long hair, but you know, you get to an age where you just can’t have it anymore.”
A few hours later, in a hostelry across the road from the Europa Hotel, McCormick admits his biggest concern about the movie. “You know, I was so over the whole Bono thing,” he sighs. “Like, I wrote the book and got it all off my chest. But with this movie happening, I can feel that envy starting up again. I even dreamt about him last night. And I could really do without that!”
And he laughs.