Trivia / Ex Machina

The Comic Book

• Shrug of God: Mitchell's sexuality was always left ambiguous. Brian K. Vaughan said he thought about revealing it but decided not to.

The Film

• Actor-Shared Background: Caleb says that his parents were teachers. Domhnall Gleeson's father was a teacher before he was an actor.
• The Cast Showoff: With both of them being ballet dancers, Alicia Vikander and Sonoya Mizuno used some of their dancing moves when playing Ava and Kyoko, respectively. Mizuno got to display her talent for mimicry during her synchronized dance scene with Nathan.
• Channel Hop: At least in North America, where distribution is handled by A24 due to Universal's US arm rejecting it.
• Dueling Works: With Chappie. Both are sci-fi films released a year apart centring around the creation of a machine with artificial intelligence, and attempts to explore some of that concept's nature. This film's far greater critical success won.
• Executive Meddling: Ex Machina had a difficult time getting a United States release. Universal's international arm produced and took most of the bill for the movie internationally. However, Universal's US executives rejected a US release believing that it wouldn't fit with the studio's film slate that year (and it's not hard to understand why; Universal had a cluster of box office smash hits that year and didn't see any room for Ex Machina to be part of it). Their art house unit, Focus Features, also rejected the film for similar reasons, meaning that indie film studio A24 had to broker an agreement with Universal to get the film to America. Unfortunately for Focus, Ex Machina's worldwide acclaim and decent financial results may have, in a roundabout way, played a role in Focus's reorganization under Universal Pictures International and head Peter Schlessel (who was instrumental in snubbing Ex Machina) consequently being fired by Universal.
• Fake American:
  • Domhnall Gleeson is Irish playing a Portland native.
  • Alicia Vikander is Swedish and speaks with an American accent as Ava.
• Hey, It's That Sound!: The sound made when the key-card activates a door to open is the 'Tejat' sound from the Android Operating System.
• Shrug of God: Alex Garland is somewhat bemused by reaction to the lack of resolution to Caleb's ultimate fate. His sympathies lie entirely with Ava, and he doesn't seem particularly bothered to elaborate on the ending.
• Star-Making Role: A somewhat downplayed example. This movie greatly boosted the profile of Alicia Vikander, and very shortly afterwards she would go on to get more major roles in films of note, one of which even won her an Oscar. Despite all this, her career never truly took off in the way it first seemed it would, even though she's worked regularly since.
• What Could Have Been: Felicity Jones was strongly considered for the role of Ava.

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