Amateur Cast: None of the Somali actors had ever acted before. Newcomer Barkhad Abdi, who plays Muse, earned several award nominations including an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In addition, some of the Navy personnel were actual Naval officers, including the Petty Officer who plays the corpsman that treats Phillips at the end of the film (her words and tone carry quite a level of authenticity when treating a traumatized victim).
Cast the Expert: In the final scene, the medic treating Captain Phillips was an actual navy medic (Petty Officer Corpsman 2nd Class Danielle Albert), who was advised to just treat him as she would a real-life patient.
Dawson Casting: 28-year-old Barkhad Abdi was cast as Abduwali Muse, who couldn't have been more than 19 at the time of the hijacking.
Enforced Method Acting: To make the capture of the ship seem real and surprising, Tom Hanks never met the men who played the pirates until the scene was filmed.
Life Imitates Art: According to his own account of the ordeal, the real Captain Phillips actually did say, "Shane, we've got a problem," at one point (when the open MOB - man overboard - failed to start, forcing them to give the pirates the enclosed lifeboat instead).
Throw It In!: The dramatic final scene of the movie, in which Captain Phillips is treated for shock in the infirmary, was a spur-of-the-moment, unscripted addition using actual Naval personnel from the ship they were filming on. The woman treating him (Petty Officer Corpsman 2nd Class Danielle Albert) was naturally quite flustered at doing a scene with Tom Hanks, until he advised her to just treat him as she would a real-life patient.
Sony Pictures tried a few times to meet with the real Abduwali Muse in prison, but he declined, feeling they'd just portray him as the bad guy.
The $30,000 dollars given by Phillips to the pirates was never recovered. The Navy men who searched the lifeboat found no trace of it.
