FILM · 2000 · UK
Billy Elliot
30 archived facts 7 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
15 Interesting Facts About Billy Elliot
- #004
A January 2020 New York Times article about Matthew Bourne's final touring production of "Swan Lake" profiled the four male dancers in the show. Three of the four men (aged between 22 and 34 when the article was published) said Billy Elliot had a major influence on their interest in dance and their decision to become dancers; the article noted that none of the men "experienced much prejudice when they started dancing, perhaps because of what [former Guardian dance critic Judith] Mackrell calls the 'Billy Elliot effect'."
- #005
When Sir Elton John first saw the film at the Cannes Film Festival, he immediately put the idea of making a stage musical of it to director Stephen Daldry.
- #006
In an interview, screenwriter Lee Hall said: "I wrote 'Billy Elliot' when I was still a novice playwright. I was trying to find a way of telling my own story visually. The first image that came to me was a boy bouncing up and down on a bed the way I used to. Once I had that part, everything to do with dance suddenly emerged."
- #007
The ballet Billy performs in the final scene is Matthew Bourne's version of "Swan Lake", in which all the Swans are played by men. Billy is dancing the Swan role that he argued about with Mrs Wilkinson (Dame Julie Walters) earlier in the film.
- #008
Jamie Bell has been dancing since he was six years old.
- #009
The film is set between 1984 and 1985 and in 1999.
- #012
Much of Easington Colliery, where most of the shoot took place, was demolished shortly after the film was finished, including the house that served as Billy's home and the surrounding street.
- #013
The production shot at a coal mine operating in Ellington, England. This meant they could use all the facilities of a real mine without having to recreate anything for the film. The mine finally closed completely in 2005.
- #021
Filming began in August 1999 in Easington, a former mining town in Durham; for the shots of the working pits, the unit had to travel about 80 kilometres north to Lynemouth in Northumberland to find the last remaining working pit. Coincidentally, this was the pit on which writer Lee Hall based his story.
- #022
American audiences may not realize that "fanny," a soft, endearing, old-fashioned and gender-neutral term for the buttocks in the United States, is a rather disrespectful slang word for the female genitalia in the United Kingdom.
- #024
It was partly inspired by the film The Stars Look Down (1940), adapted from A. J. Cronin's novel, which tells of various injustices in a mining community in North East England. The film starred Sir Michael Redgrave, Emlyn Williams and Margaret Lockwood, and part of the action takes place in Tynecastle, a fictionalized Newcastle upon Tyne where Lee Hall, the screenwriter of this film, was born.
- #025
On 13 October 2010, the London musical "Billy Elliot" welcomed its three millionth patron at the Victoria Palace Theatre.
- #026
Billy's mother died on 2 December 1983.
- #028
Jamie Bell and Dame Julie Walters appeared together in the film Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017).
- #029
Lee Hall completed his first draft in 3 weeks.
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