of $160,000. The film was at first released to a small number of theaters in Europe, but when a producer from the Sundance Film Festival saw the film, he brought it to the US. Once received glowing praise at Sundance, was given wider release in the US and went on to win the 2008 Academy Award for Best Original Score. Hansard and Irglová became celebrities overnight.


The close parallels between Hansard and Irglová’s lives and the Guy and the Girl’s have been a subject of constant comment since the film’s release. The two began dating while filming Once and fell in love as their characters did. In a review of the film, New York Times critic A.O. Scott notes, “The two main performers are really singers and songwriters and they’re performing their own compositions, and that gives the movie a special appeal.” An interviewer from The Onion AV Club notes that the two leads were “cast both in the film and in the public eye as an endearing, endangered couple producing achingly vulnerable music. And their real-­‐life relationship seemed to make the love story particularly irresistible, particularly once an Oscar win for Best Original Song (among many other awards) gave their story the happy ending that the film lacked.”


Because the lead actors are essentially playing themselves, their performances seem to acquire a kind of authenticity and believability that makes the story particularly fascinating. They are not pretending to fall in love; we are actually watching two people fall in love. The film both depicts and documents a once-­‐in-­‐a-­‐lifetime romance between two musicians. When asked if he would pursue a career in acting following his work on the film, Hansard replied “Well, playing a guy who writes songs and busks on Grafton Street in Dublin and falls in love with Markéta Irglová wasn't very difficult for me.”


Glen Hansard on his relationship with Markéta Irglová in an interview with the A.V. Club:


It’s probably the one aspect of… everything about what happened during Once was magical and amazing, and the fact that me and Mar started going out, it was just private and lovely. And somehow, it got out that we were… It happened in this weird way, that it got out that we were together. And neither of us really cared, but then it turned into a bigger story than either of us were particularly comfortable with, because this idea of celebrity is a very insecure notion, and the fact that it became part of the story, like you say, “storybook ending,” or we were “living the sequel,” that also got mentioned.


And, to be honest, not over here, but in Czechoslovakia, where Mar’s from, there were people following us around with cameras and making up stories. And we almost became that “showing up in celeb magazines” kind of thing. But I don’t think either of us ever really wanted to embrace that aspect. It just wasn’t attractive.


So it was a little uncomfortable, and then we just kind of naturally came to an end. It wasn’t like we… it wasn’t political to us. This is our f-­‐-­‐-­‐ing lives, this isn’t career. This is different. It’s not about… these decisions are bigger than any kind of pressure to stay together. F-­‐-­‐-­‐ that. So when it passed, I guess myself and Mar honestly sat down and went, “Do we want to continue with this? Do we want to continue making music together and be a band?” And we both came to the conclusion that “F-­‐-­‐-­‐ it, we’ve known each other a long time, and we’re great mates, and we do enjoy it, so let’s do it.”


Hansard and Irglová are no longer dating, though they


remain close friends


and continue to perform and release music as The Swell Season. Their most recent album “Strict Joy” was released in 2009. Irglová was married in Summer 2011.


Is fiction more powerful when it has grounding in reality?


How do parallels with real events or actors’ actual lives influence how you respond to works of fiction? Have you ever been confused as to the line between truth and fabrication in a work of fiction? How do you think such confusion would affect the actors in the piece?


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