Trivia

The first time Michael Fassbender saw the film was with his father Josef. Both were relieved that his mother Adele could not make the screening.

The scene where Brandon hears his sister sing in the restaurant was shot in real time. James Badge Dale and Michael Fassbender had never heard Carey Mulligan sing before so their reactions were real. The scene was shot at 3 a.m with cameras focused on all 3 performers at the same time.

Carey Mulligan stated on The Graham Norton Show that her "dad is not allowed" to see the film.

During the 2012 Newsweek Magazine Oscar roundtable, Michael Fassbender said that he really urinated on camera during a scene in which his character was seen urinating (usually these sorts of bodily function scenes are simulated during the filming of a movie, if only because of the difficulty of replicating them over multiple takes). George Clooney, who was also participating in the roundtable, asked Fassbender how many takes he had to do of the urination, and Fassbender said three.

The movie's Hungarian poster was banned as it showed the title written in semen.

Carey Mulligan admitted she's only seen the film once but didn't watch her first scene where her brother [Michael Fassbender] surprises her in the shower because she hates seeing herself naked. She said, "I don't wear a bikini on the beach, I wear jogging shorts and a T-shirt. I literally have not looked at myself naked in the mirror since I was 12 years old. I'm horribly uncomfortable with things like that, and I've definitely never been naked in front of my family." When asked why she agreed to do the nude scene, she said, "I've always been quite staunchly feminist about taking my clothes off in a film. I always felt like, unless it's completely appropriate, then it's just gratuitous. But I read the script, and it was 100 percent who she was. She's a character who wants to be seen ... That opening scene is her trying to be seen in the most extreme way. She's just comfortable, and an exhibitionist, and provocative. And she likes to dig at [her brother]. It's not incestuous, it's not any of the things that people have implied. She knows that it makes him uncomfortable. He throws her a towel, and she throws it back at him. It's funny to her."

Cary Mulligan said director Steve McQueen gave her the role of Sissy because she offered to get a tattoo of a seagull. She revealed in an interview that someone sent her the script for this film and she loved it. So when she was in London for the London Film Festival and heard McQueen was in town meeting with actresses for the film, she asked to meet him and practically begged him for an audition. She told him that she read the script and thought it's exactly why she wanted to be an actress. She said she starred as Nina in the play The Seagull by Anton Chekhov a few years before and there's a passage where Nina, who wants to be an actress, says, "I know now, I understand, it's not about fame or glory or all the things I used to dream about. It's the ability to endure, to bear your cross. I have faith. When I think about my vocation, I am not afraid of life." Mulligan said she was thinking about getting a tattoo of a seagull to always remind her of that, because it's how she feels. McQueen thought that was a great idea and said if she did it, she could have the role. So she did.

This is the second feature length collaboration between actor Michael Fassbender and director Steve McQueen, the first being Hunger (2008).

During the jogging scene, Brandon is seen waiting at a stop light and in the background is an advertisement for the TV series Army Wives (2007). Lucy Walters, who plays the woman on the subway train, also appears in Army Wives as Amy Sandberg.

The sex scene with Michael Fassbender and Amy Hargreaves pressed against the glass of a room window in Manhattan's The Standard hotel was actually filmed above a busy street during the day. Spectators watched while the two actors, in the nude, smiled and waved at them from the hotel room above between takes. Since the Standard Hotel opened in New York in 2009, it has become notorious for its guests engaging in public sexual activity in front of their rooms' windows, sometimes for the entertainment of audiences on the street or in the High Line park below the building. This phenomenon has been documented in articles in New York Magazine, The New York Post, and The Observer, among other publications. In June 2013 in China, a Chinese couple fell to their deaths while performing a similar act, when the window they were leaning against gave way.

In the very last shot of the film where Brandon looks at the woman on the subway train, the subway ad of a church called The River NYC is prominently featured behind him. This is actually the church Carey Mulligan attends whenever she is in New York City.