One of the sweetest success stories of the past year is the one behind John Carney's Once, starring Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, a couple of musicians who, as reporter J. Freedom du Lac puts it, had "exactly one combined acting credit between them" when Carney coaxed them into starring in the picture, which was already built around the songs they'd written together. (Originally the male lead was to be played by Cillian Murphy; after Murphy dropped out, Carney had to talk a blue streak to convince Hansard, who had appeared on-screen more than fifteen years earlier to play a bass player in Alan Parker's The Commitments and hated the experience, to step in front of a camera again. The movie, which was made for $150,000, was not supposed to be a big deal. Now that it is, Carney and his stars are learning about the perils of getting what you wish for but never really expected to get. "I've been terrified by the reaction," says Hansard, a year or so into a steady stream of happy festival responses and rave reviews and top-ten lists and, now, award nominations. "The film is too small to withstand this kind of praise. It looks like it was shot on a mobile phone. And people see it and they think there's something wrong with the sound in the cinema. But that's just the way it sounds!"
Hansard and Irglova were at the Grammys recently, were they were up for two awards but didn't get any. Next Sunday, they'll be at the Academy Awards show, to perform their nominated song "Falling Slowly." In the movie, it's a gently throbbing ache of a moment between a couple of people who might be perfect for each other but aren't fated to get together. In real life, things worked out a little more cozily. "About the third day in," Hansard recalls of the shoot, "John started predicting that we'd get together. . . He kept joking and calling us his Bogart and Bacall. . . And after filming, Fox Searchlight put us in a tour bus together, and it just felt natural. We graduated from a feeling to this. It made sense." It wasn't their first meeting; Hansard, who's thirty-seven, and Irglova, who's nineteen, have known each other since he was thirty and she was thirteen. (Go ahead, go ewwwwwww! if you need to. By all means, get it out of your system.) Irglov, whose father was a promoter for Hansard's old band the Frames when they played in her native Czechoslovakia, says now, "I always felt a very strong connection with him, but it never came up because it was never going to happen. There was no point in trying to dream about it. But it's not like I just realized this last year that I have strong feelings for Glen." They now live together in Dublim. Between awards show appearances.
