![]() While filming, Pugh posted photos of the county on her Instagram account contrasting her usual Hollywood stamping ground in LA with Hollywood, Co Wicklow: “Less traffic, greener hills, great Guinness.”Ī modern cafe in Redcross Co Wicklow was transformed into Ryan’s Spirit Grocery – the grocery/bar/shop/lodgings where Nurse Lib is staying. The flat, featureless bogland depicted in the novel was deemed a bit too boring to sustain the entire film and so there are also heart-stopping cinematic views of the hills and valleys of Wicklow which no doubt Fáilte Ireland will be thrilled about. For the exterior scenes, the O’Donnell cabin, surrounded by bog, was built from scratch in Co Wicklow’s Sally Gap, where, apart from some scenes in Dublin, much of the filming took place. We learn that this is the first Netflix production shot entirely in the State. With the scene finally in the can, and Pugh now free to go on a selfie spree with fellow cast members, we’re led by production designer Grant Montgomery into the O’Donnell house set, a rough-hewn, two-storey famine-era cottage full of the religious paraphernalia of the day, cards hand painted with images of saints, crucifixes and candlesticks modelled on icons. On the monitor we watch Anna’s father Malachy O’Donnell (Caolan Byrne) and Sister Michael (Josie Walker), the nun charged, alongside Nurse Lib, with watching Anna in eight hour shifts. The movie was produced jointly with Element Pictures – who also adapted Donoghue’s novel Room for the screen - and House Productions. Lelio, who won an Oscar for his movie A Fantastic Woman and widespread praise for films including Disobedience, adapted the novel for the screen with Donoghue and Alice Birch, one of the writers of Normal People. Photograph: Aidan Monaghan/NetflixĪt one point on set the action is paused by Lelio because of the noise from an aircraft passing overhead, the modern world momentarily crashing into the mid-19th century. Without giving too much away to those who have not read the book, the brother’s death and a related family secret gradually emerge as crucial drivers of Anna’s behaviour.įlorence Pugh as Lib Wright in The Wonder. Lib becomes consumed with thoughts of saving the girl, having discovered the reasons behind both the fast and the ritualistic prayers Anna offers up several times a day in the hope of getting her recently deceased brother into heaven. Nearing the end of her two-week mission, Nurse Lib has come to care deeply for Anna and realises that her surveillance has exacerbated a potentially fatal decline in the girl’s health. “I’d set it in Ireland, of course – not just because that’s my homeland, but because ever since the Great Famine of the 1840s, we’ve defined ourselves as a people intimate with hunger.” “It seemed to say a lot about what it’s meant to be a girl – in many western countries, from the 16th century right through to the 20th – that these girls became celebrities by not eating,” she wrote. Donoghue, in an explanatory note in her 2016 novel, wrote about her fascination with history’s real life “fasting girls” and her decision to set the book during this period. The film, directed by Oscar winning Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio, is a domestic psychodrama dripping with religiosity, patriarchal oppression and family secrets ,all set against the backdrop of a country that’s still reeling from a national trauma. This is the gothic puzzle they want the nurse to solve: after four months without food, during which she claims to be surviving only on “manna from heaven”, is Anna a medical wonder, a devious hoaxer, or – the preferred outcome of the priest on the committee – some kind of religious miracle? Recently widowed young English nurse Mrs Lib Wright (Pugh), who worked alongside Florence Nightingale in the Crimean war, has been charged by an all-male committee in the village with the task of watching over the girl to gather evidence. The story takes place in 1862, around ten years after the famine ended, with the shadow of the Great Hunger hanging over the village. The Wonder tells the story of deeply religious “fasting girl” Anna O’Donnell, from a tiny midlands village in Ireland, who mysteriously is still alive after refusing to eat since the day of her 11th birthday, four months ago. ![]() Shot during the pandemic, the joy emanating from Pugh and her colleagues offers a bright contrast to the grim weather and the film’s compellingly claustrophobic themes. ![]() Rain hammers down on the roof of a vast aircraft hangar at Dublin’s Weston Airport as a giggling Florence Pugh dashes, in period costume, to capture some selfies with cast members who have filmed their final scenes. It’s September 2021, the global plague is still raging and, negative Covid tests secured, a set visit has been arranged to go behind the scenes of the movie adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s acclaimed novel The Wonder.
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