Months before his latest book was published, Max Porter went on holiday with Cillian Murphy and a mutual friend. “I told them, ‘I’ve just finished another novel,'” Porter recalls. “And they said, ‘But you only just wrote one.’ I replied, ‘Well, I write them quickly and then edit them slowly.'” He ended up reading the book aloud, giving them their first look into the jumbled mind of a teenage delinquent named Shy, who lives in a “dilapidated old mansion turned into a school for troubled boys in the middle of nowhere.”
Murphy had become close friends with Porter after starring in a stage adaptation of Porter’s debut novel, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers. Porter wasn’t looking for another collaboration. In fact, he said, “I thought this book was unadaptable because it’s like a weather system inside Shy’s head. I was also a bit concerned about all my work being turned into adaptations.”
Two years later, Shy was published. Meanwhile, Murphy had started his own film company, Big Things, and was “trying to come up with a project” to follow its award-winning first film, Small Things Like These, which dealt with abusive church-run homes for unmarried mothers in Ireland. “Max and I talk all the time,” Murphy says. Both have sons. Murphy comes from a family of teachers, and Porter teaches part-time in prisons and spent part of the lockdown mentoring boys who had been excluded from school. They decided they wanted to create something about care. “It wasn’t specifically about masculinity at that point,” Porter explains, “but something related to the care system.”
There was just one problem. “While I love Shy as a book,” Murphy says, “I could see it was unadaptable.” However, the novel featured a minor character named Steve, the headteacher. “Then,” Porter continues, “I suggested, ‘What if we focus on Steve and leave the book behind?’ So I started over completely.”
The result is a powerful, expressionistic story set in a last-chance remand school in the 1990s, where overworked and underpaid staff try to help boys society has given up on. It’s both an angry critique of a broken system—severely damaged by earlier Tory budget cuts—and a demonstration of why teenagers like Shy are worth saving, despite their often terrible behavior. For example, Shy has vandalized a shop, crashed a car, stabbed his stepdad’s finger, and broken someone’s nose.
Porter wrote the screenplay himself—his first—with Murphy starring as the beleaguered headteacher managing a group of unruly boys. The film also features three women: a tough but caring deputy head, a student counselor, and a timid new staff member. Soon, Tracey Ullman, Emily Watson, and Simbiatu Ajikawo (aka Little Simz) had joined the cast.
Casting the students was a bigger task. “We saw 3,500 kids,” Murphy says. One actor stood out for the role of Shy: Jay Lycurgo, who was born in 1998, two years after the film is set. In the mid-90s, his father played for Manchester United but later worked in pupil referral. “When I got the email about the audition,” Lycurgo says, “I asked my dad if I could visit him. I went to his office and ended up spending a few weeks observing at schools.”
I’m interviewing them all in a maze of hotel rooms the morning after the London premiere of Steve. It’s been a hectic few days, with well-received premieres also held in Toronto and Cork. “A drama filled with raw energy and the shadow of death…”Peter Bradshaw of this paper described the film as “a brutal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour.” Variety’s Peter Debruge praised it as “a profoundly moving and superbly acted diamond in the rough.”
The author, Max Porter, actor Cillian Murphy, and director Tim Mielants are interviewed separately, looking tired. Rebecca Ullman is unwell upstairs, but actors Jay Lycurgo and Simbiatu “Little Simz” Ajikawo are together, full of energy and joking around. They are amused to find they both failed to get into the Brit School for performing arts. Ajikawo didn’t even get an audition, while Lycurgo remembers botching a dramatic speech he’d prepared for his GCSEs. “I didn’t get in because I thought acting was just about crying,” he admits.
The story unfolds over one day and was filmed in sequence across 29 days, following a two-week rehearsal for the young actors to bond. Mielants, who is Belgian and speaks in metaphors, was finishing post-production on Small Things Like These when he received Porter’s script. He notes the stark contrast: while Small Things had sparse dialogue over silence, Porter built “a cathedral of words on top of the iceberg,” which initially daunted him.
Mielants says his own midlife crisis, triggered by his father’s Alzheimer’s and his brother’s death, helped him connect to the material. Revisiting family videos from the 1990s made him appreciate the power of people speaking directly to the camera. This inspired the film’s raw, handheld style and the device of having each character describe themselves in three words on camera. While the boys are energetic, Murphy’s character Steve is emotional and speechless. “I’m looking at him instead of trying to understand him,” says Mielants, “and that’s where the surrealness comes back.”
The film pays homage to the mixed musical styles of the 1990s. Mielants recalls Porter sending him playlists, so he storyboarded while listening to drum’n’bass, which wasn’t his usual taste. The music helped him visualize the inner world of the characters, capturing the intense energy and emotions of being a teenager in 1996.
Murphy suggested filming in sequence over a short period, inspired by his experience working with Ken Loach. Normally, he prepares intensely for months, but for this role, he drew on his own childhood as the son of teachers and a sometimes troublesome student. Shooting in order allowed him to embody Steve’s constant struggle—underfunded, sleep-deprived, and barely holding things together—without over-preparing.
Beneath the surface, the film explores the parallels and contrasts between the mid-1990s and today. While technology like dictaphones and Walkmans feels dated, issues like underfunded care systems and the stigmatization of young men remain relevant.Familiar. “Hopefully, this highlights that the problems these kids face are lifelong,” says Murphy. “They existed before technology, the internet, and social media. These developments have just made them worse.”
Teenage boys often seem easy to dismiss. “I think they’re an easy target, both statistically and ideologically. And certainly in Ireland and the UK, the suicide rate among young men is tragically and staggeringly high,” he adds. Although in person, Lycurgo seems nothing like the troubled character Shy, he understands exactly what Murphy means. “I deal with mental health every day through my own personal struggles,” he says.
At school, Lycurgo was cheeky and easily distracted, more interested in football than studying. It wasn’t until he was 19 that he discovered he had dyslexia and realized he could have benefited from the kind of individual support he saw in his father’s referral units. His breakthrough in playing Shy came when he realized he could use his own vulnerability. “I felt like it was a part of me that I just had to show everyone. So it wasn’t so much about, ‘I’ve got this character,’ but more, ‘Okay, how can I use this to honor Shy and respect the material?'”
By the time Ullman and Ajikawo arrived on set, the actors playing the boys had already bonded in a loud, energetic way. “They were so wild and hostile that I wondered what I’d gotten myself into,” says Ullman. “But as a grandmother, I understand that boyish energy and their underlying vulnerability. I started to enjoy it. By the end, I was even knitting booties for one of them who had just become a father.”
Ajikawo faced the added challenge of balancing rehearsals with preparing for her performance alongside Coldplay on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, which was scheduled for the weekend after filming wrapped. While in person she is stylish and articulate, in the film she plays a plain, timid character. “I missed the workshops,” she says, “which I think worked out well and felt true to my role—since I’m new to the school in the story.”
In her other identity as Little Simz, she wrote a song for the film. “I wanted it to feel like a ’90s hit, with moments of tenderness,” she says. “But Shy loves jungle music, so we also included some great beats.” The track is called “Don’t Leave Too Soon.” Watching early cuts of the film, she realized that, at its heart, it’s a race to save Shy from himself. She looks warmly at the actor who brought the story to life and tells him, “In the song, I was saying, ‘You want to be seen, and I see you.’ It’s a love letter to you.” That sentiment serves as a fitting summary of the film. Shy is in cinemas now and will be available on Netflix starting October 3.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about They were completely wild Cillian Murphy Tracey Ullman and the cast discuss the intense school drama Steve
General Questions
Q What is Steve
A Steve is an intense school drama where a detention session escalates dramatically resulting in a student getting a broken nose
Q Who are the main actors in Steve
A The main cast includes Cillian Murphy and Tracey Ullman who have discussed the films intensity
Q What does They were completely wild refer to
A This is a quote from the cast describing the intense and unpredictable nature of the scenes or the characters behavior in the film Steve
About the Story and Themes
Q What is the main conflict in Steve
A The central conflict revolves around a detention session that spins out of control leading to a violent incidenta broken nosehighlighting underlying tensions between students and authority
Q Is Steve based on a true story
A The FAQs dont specify if its based on true events It is presented as a dramatic school story
Q What are the main themes of the drama
A The film explores themes of rebellion the consequences of authority teenage angst and how a single moment can erupt into violence
About the Cast and Production
Q What roles do Cillian Murphy and Tracey Ullman play
A While specific roles arent detailed here they are part of the cast discussing the film Cillian Murphy often plays intense characters and Tracey Ullman is known for her versatile acting which could include a teacher or authority figure
Q Why did the cast describe the experience as completely wild
A They likely used this phrase because the filming process or the storys emotions were very raw chaotic and emotionally demanding especially for a scene as intense as one leading to a broken nose
Q Was the broken nose scene real or acted
A It was almost certainly acted using special effects and choreography to ensure actor safety but the performance was so convincing that it felt real
Deeper Analysis Viewer Questions
Q What is the significance of the broken nose in the story
A The broken
