While rising in the Irish theater scene, Lewis Brophy was always compared to fellow Dubliner Barry Keoghan.
“When I started off, I remember thinking, ‘You know what? I don’t know how I’m gonna do this. I don’t know how far I’m gonna go.’ But then I see Barry, and I said ‘If he could do it, I could do it.’ And then turns out a couple of years later, we’re both starting a film together,” Brophy told TheWrap in our TIFF 2026 interview and portrait studio.
That film is “Lemonade,” a drama from director Kim Bartley in which Brophy takes a role that Keoghan himself might have taken a decade ago as Danny, an 18-year-old who is struggling immensely to integrate into society after leaving the foster care system and who makes a mistake that could ruin his future. But then he unexpectedly reconnects with a social worker named Josh, played by Keoghan, who had previously tried to help Danny but fell by the wayside due to his own mistakes.
Bartley said she first approached Keoghan to be an executive producer for the film, but found out to her surprise that he was interested in not only producing, but playing Josh as well.
“There’s a lot of parallels in the story with his own life, and I think that’s probably why it it resonated with him. But it’s also a very different role for him. It’s a very mature, gentle kind of part. Very different to the kind of parts that he tends to do. I think it was interesting, challenging and very emotional and personal for him as well,” Bartley said.
For Bartley, “Lemonade” is her first scripted film, having spent her career in documentaries. Working with Brophy, Keoghan and the rest of the film’s cast was something she imagined would be a major challenge, but wasn’t as detached from her doc work as she anticipated.
“I thought it was some kind of magical thing I didn’t know how to do,” she said. “I’ve always worked on long form documentaries that you shoot over years, observational, getting to know people and spending time with them, and in fact [working with actors] is a similar dynamic. It’s really about relationship building, and I really enjoyed it.”
“Lemonade” has been acquired for release in the U.K. and Ireland for early next year and is in search of international distribution.
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