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Meet Kneecap, the Irish-language hip-hop trio with a Sundance hit film coming out

July 30, 2024

When director Rich Peppiatt first approached the three members of Kneecap, a Belfast hip-hip trio that raps in the Irish language, they weren’t sure what to make of his completely unsolicited pitch to make a feature film about them.

“We were very hesitant,” says rapper Naoise Ó Cairealláin. “At first because, well, No. 1 he’s English, and that’s enough for us to be quite skeptical because for a long time the English would profit off the Irish labor.

“Also, we’re the band; we’re Kneecap,” he says as bandmate JJ Ó Dochartaigh looks on. “We’re a real-life band, not a mythical made-up band. And if we made a film that was cringy, everybody else would move onto the next film. We’d still be Kneecap, and if the film was crap, it would be very detrimental to our music careers, I could imagine.

“But thankfully, I think it paid off.”

Naoise Ó Cairealláin as Móglaí Bap, JJ Ó Dochartaigh as DJ Próvai, and Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh as Mo Chara in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh as Mo Chara, left, with director Rich Peppiatt, center, in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Michael Fassbender as Arlo Ó Cairealláin in “Kneecap.” (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Naoise Ó Cairealláin as Móglaí Bap, left, and Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh as Mo Chara in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

JJ Ó Dochartaigh as DJ Próvai, right, and Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh as Mo Chara in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Naoise Ó Cairealláin as Móglaí Bap in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh as Mo Chara in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Michael Fassbender as Arlo Ó Cairealláin in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

JJ Ó Dochartaigh as DJ Próvai in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Simone Kirby as Dolores in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Naoise Ó Cairealláin as Móglaí Bap with Michael Fassenbender as Arlo Ó Cairealláin in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Naoise Ó Cairealláin as Móglaí Bap, right, and Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh as Mo Chara in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Naoise Ó Cairealláin as Móglaí Bap, right, with Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh as Mo Chara in “Kneecap,” the real-life story of a Belfast hip-hop trio who rap in Irish. (Photo by Helen Sloan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

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“Kneecap,” Peppiatt’s biopic of the band, won the NEXT Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in January. In addition to the band members, the cast includes the internationally known Irish actor Michael Fassbender as Ó Cairealláin’s father, as well as the familiar faces of Irish actors such as Simone Kirby and Josie Walker.

Recently, Ó Cairealláin, Ó Dochartaigh, and Peppiatt came to Los Angeles for a few days to talk about the movie before it opens in theaters on Friday, Aug. 2. (Third member Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, was delayed leaving Northern Ireland after he contracted COVID-19.)

“We have a WhatsApp group that I set up in December 2019,” Peppiatt says. “It’s called ‘Kneecap Go to Hollywood,’ at the time as a joke. That was when I first met them. And flying over, I looked at the group and the date and I was like, ‘That’s crazy.’ We’re flying to L.A. with the film all this time later.’

“So yeah, that was quite nice at the moment,” he says. “We had a little cheers to that.”

‘That punk energy’

Peppiatt might never have stumbled onto Kneecap, the movie never made, but for going a little stir-crazy at home in Belfast a few weeks after the birth of his second daughter.

“I needed to get out of the house and have a drink for an hour,” he says from a table on a terrace at the London West Hollywood hotel. “I was wandering down the street and saw a sign for Irish hip-hop playing that night and I went.

“I was just blown away by their charisma, their stage presence,” Peppiatt says. “It reminded me of my favorite band growing up, Rage Against the Machine, which felt like a political act.

“Often in music, the politics have gone out of it in a way today. Everything was so PR-ed and managed, and it was all career-driven.

“And the idea of having these three lads on stage who were throwing fake bags of drugs into the crowd, and pulling their trousers down with ‘Brits Out’ (written on their bums),” Peppiatt continued. “They didn’t care. It was just that punk energy about that that just connected with me.

“I don’t know whether it was part of me sort of feeling I was in my mid-30s, a father of two now,” he says. “Suddenly, there was this something that felt youthful and vibrant, and I was going, ‘I want a bit of that back in my life.’”

Peppiatt, who had previously made documentaries and worked in television, knew that the obvious move was to do a documentary on Kneecap, but neither he nor the band wanted to be obvious.

“They were interested in the idea of a narrative feature,” he says. “But they’re also very skeptical. Because when somebody approaches you and goes, ‘I want to make a film about you, and you’re going to play yourselves in it’ you kind of go, ‘Uh, really? OK, whatever you say, mate.’”

Of course, the idea of making a biopic about a band almost nobody knew outside of Belfast, and maybe just West Belfast at that, might not have been the smartest idea either.

“It made no sense in a way to be making a biopic about a band that’d never released an album, weren’t signed to a record label, rapping in a language that no one spoke,” Peppiatt says. “Why the hell would you make a biopic about these guys?

“But it was so illogical, so stupid and foolhardy, that it actually in its own way came out the other side and was like, ‘Well, that is the very reason to make it, because it’s never been done, right?’” he says. “The minute you go, ‘It’s never been done,’ it’s going to be a disaster or it could be cool.”

For the ‘craic’

Kneecap’s name has roots in The Troubles, those three decades of violence between those who wanted the British out of Northern Ireland and those who wanted to maintain British rule. Kneecapping – shooting someone in the knee – was a punishment administered by members of the Irish Republican Army for a range of perceived infractions, such as selling and using drugs, as Ó Cairealláin and Ó Hannaidh are seen doing in the movie.

Growing up with that history, the members of Kneecap developed a sharp political edge to its songs and performances. As part of the post-Troubles generation, they also sought to be a new voice in Northern Irish youth culture too, the band members say.

“We met organizing contemporary Irish language festivals in Belfast,” says Ó Cairealláin, whose stage name, Móglaí Bap, is a reference to a boyhood haircut that resembled that of Mowgli from “The Jungle Book.” JJ used to play pop music in Irish before he embarked on this journey. And Liam Óg used to come as a young fellow to the festivals and help us organize them.

“There was a subculture of young people growing up in Belfast who spoke Irish, and we all kind of found each other,” he says. “We would go partying together all the time on the weekends, and we noticed that a lot of the terms that exist in English didn’t exist in Irish. Youth culture terms, like terms for drugs and that there.”

So they created their own translations, says Ó Dochartaigh, who performs wearing a balaclava in the tricolors of the Irish flag, and goes by DJ Próvai, a reference to the Provisional IRA, which fought to end British rule of Northern Ireland.

“We had words like ‘snaois,’” he says. “The old fellas in the bar used to have snuff, so we kind of repurposed that to mean cocaine.”

Dúidín, the word for a traditional Irish clay pipe, was appropriated to use for a different kind of smoking, Ó Cairealláin adds.

“And it was from that tiny subculture, that tiny movement, that Kneecap was born,” he says. “We wanted to let people know that we exist. Because I figured out people probably didn’t know that, No. 1, Irish language isn’t just a funny accent in English, No. 2, that there are young people who speak it.”

“December 2017 we put our first track out, ‘C.E.A.R.T.A.’” – the letters spell the Irish word for “rights,” Ó Cairealláin says. “Just, as we say in Ireland, for the ‘craic,’ for fun. We had no intentions of really even being in a band or playing gigs. We had no idea anyone would be interested in hip-hop in Irish.”

The song was chosen for a spotlight on an Irish-language radio station but was pulled at the last minute when local politicians caught wind of its drug-fueled, anti-police lyrics.

“No one actually listened to it at the start,” Ó Cairealláin says of how the song originally was chosen. “They just assumed, ‘Ah, lovely song in Irish, it must be very artsy, and about the green fields of Ireland.”

A petition drive ensued, and “C.E.A.R.T.A.” went viral.

“If you want anything to do good, ban it,” Ó Dochartaigh says. “Sure way to get some promotion for it.”

Kneecap goes Hollywood

After several months of wooing, Kneecap told Peppiatt they were in.

“We became friendly,” Ó Cairealláin says. “He bought us some Guinness, which is the way to any Irishman’s heart. And we just kind of realized he was serious, and he had a plan for us.”

Peppiatt, who signed up for Irish language classes the day after that first night of Guinness, went to work immediately, hunting down development funds and signing up the three rappers – and himself – for six months of acting classes.

“It was a very complicated script,” he says. “Lots of different themes. It’s tri-protagonist. I remember realizing that and going, ‘I’m going to watch all tri-protagonist films to get a grasp on how structurally people pull it off. Then you realize there aren’t really any, and you go, ‘Oh, that’s a bit ominous.’

“It took quite a while to nail that, particularly because the band themselves were very keen that no one was a lead character,” Peppiatt says. “They were bickering like children about, you know, who’s got more lines? Saying, his lines are a bit more than my lines, he got the best jokes.

“And then the almighty row that occurred when I revealed that Liam Óg was going to be the narrator,” he adds, laughing. “All, ‘We want to be the narrator, we’ll all be the narrator,’ and me like, ‘That’s not really how narration works, you know.’”

To be clear, he’s joking about the difficulty of working with his three-headed protagonist, partly in awe of just how quickly they learned their way around filmmaking.

“The one thing that did annoy me about them was that they had such an innate grasp of story, something that they really understood, where the beats of a story were as if they’d been involved in scripts for years,” Peppiatt says, laughing. “And that really grated on me, because I’ve spent years trying to be able to do that.”

The film traces the anarchic rise of Kneecap from the banned single and its first sparsely attended pub gig through its scrapes with police, politicians and paramilitary. Its unvarnished narrative includes plenty of drugs, dealt and consumed, while also deftly pairing the rise of Kneecap’s popularity with the long, hard-fought political campaign that in 2022 led to the recognition of Irish as an official language in Northern Ireland.

Peppiatt jokes that the biggest challenge with the first-time actors of Kneecap was to get them to stay sober for the shoot. In truth, they were naturals, he says.

“Sometimes people think if you’re playing yourself it’s kind of easy,” he says. “I think it’s the opposite of that. There’s a real vulnerability for them to put themselves up there that way when the plotlines are really tracking really some very vulnerable moments in their lives.”

All flashing before their eyes

The first-time director and cast saw the finished film was when “Kneecap” screened at Sundance. Suddenly, what had seemed their little project was splashed across the big screen, before an audience of Hollywood movers and shakers.

“It’s a nerve-racking thing, seeing yourself as a big 50-foot head for the first time,” Ó Dochartaigh says. “You see all the blemishes, you see all the worry and distress. The makeup.”

When that screening ended and the positive reviews poured in, the reality of what they’d sank in, Ó Cairealláin says.

“Obviously, the movie is colloquial, all that slang and terminology that wouldn’t be quite common in America,” he says. “So we weren’t sure. I mean, we had a class film. We love it. But we weren’t sure how it would translate in America.

“As soon as we won the audience award at Sundance, it just kind of relieved all that. We were like, It’s not just something that would be well-received in Ireland, it’s going to be something that’s internationally well-received too.”

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