“It was an odd experience,” Brendan Gleeson says with a smile. Seated in a rehearsal space in a leafy part of Dublin, the Irish actor is reflecting on the episode he hosted in 2022 of Saturday Night Live, the US television sketch show that likes to have stars deliver questionable comedy skits to a studio audience.
“I didn’t have experience of it, and I first said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ Then Colin Farrell said, ‘You should do it,’ and I know him well enough to trust him – that he’s not a surfacy person, that there was something that was worth doing,” Gleeson says.
“The whole process was fascinating. They don’t really want an act, and yet you’re not yourself. They only make up jokes that week. You get things that half-work. It’s very gruelling. And you don’t know who the audience are. I didn’t really want to watch it back.”
It’s a measure of Gleeson’s popularity that, although his hosting of the show with Farrell attracted a few nitpicky reviews, for many it felt akin to watching a beloved groom give a wedding speech after a long engagement. We were on his side, willing to live through the cringy bits in the service of seeing the show acknowledge a simple truth: Gleeson is a star.
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With roles in The Guard, Paddington 2, The Tragedy of Macbeth, In Bruges, Joker: Folie à Deux, Calvary and The Banshees of Inisherin, Gleeson is one of Ireland’s most prominent and charismatic actors. At 70, the Malahide resident – father of his fellow performers Domhnall and Brian Gleeson – is in the remarkable position of being busier than ever. Or, as he puts it, “I haven’t time to wash my face.”
We’re meeting today because Gleeson is returning to the stage after a decade’s absence, specifically to the 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin, followed by the Harold Pinter Theatre in London, where he will make his West End debut as Jack in The Weir, which is being directed by its writer, Conor McPherson. A tale of friends meeting for a drink in Co Leitrim when a stranger among them reveals an emotionally engulfing personal story, the play features little surface action yet delivers a remarkable punch.
As I slip into the rehearsal space at Wesley House in Ranelagh, Gleeson and the rest of the cast are into their second week of line reads and stage preparations. They’re not sweating it yet. Or not quite yet. Playing the part of the oleaginous estate agent Finbar, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor has thrown away his playbook to summon up the words from memory. So has Seán McGinley, in the role of bachelor Jim. Both have monologues to give. There are rueful chuckles as occasionally a prompt is needed or a line flubbed.
Gleeson is sitting between them, on a bar stool, his white shirt and suit jacket on, hair slicked back, a spider web of lines tracing his forehead, inhabiting his role with earthy precision. Across the room, McPherson, inscrutable in a cap and glasses, is a quiet, watchful presence for all the actors, who also include Kate Phillips and Owen McDonnell.
“I’m trying to allow them to be as close to themselves as they can be,” McPherson says later. “Brendan has a huge presence. He’s very powerful, very funny, but he can give you lots of depth. It’s a pleasure. It’s like if you get into a very expensive car: you don’t have to do very much; it’s just, ‘We’re going.’”
“I’m bad for the planet?” the actor huffs amicably when I quote the expensive-car line back to him. But he’s smiling. “Ah, that’s nice.” He enjoys collaborating with directors and has a healthy respect in particular for the Irish theatre-makers he has worked with over the years.
“In America, in a lot of TV, tailoring the dialogue is almost taken for granted. A lot of actors would take control of what they’re doing themselves. But with somebody like Conor McPherson or Martin McDonagh, the rhythm of the language is so important; everything is so precise. You’d be an idiot to try and mess with it.”
Gleeson loves The Weir, which was written nearly three decades ago, and is set entirely in the bar where the group meet, for how it portrays us as Irish people. The stories that are told are pithy and revealing, a simulacrum of life in Ireland in the 1990s.
“Lads would come down to the pub, and the level of conversation that used to go on in those places: underestimate these people at your peril,” Gleeson says. “There was an incredible beauty in the way people informed themselves. In England you’d go into a pub and you didn’t strike up a conversation the way you would over there. In Ireland there was too much drinking; it was no harm for that to shift. But the pub was a centre whereby people touched base. It was like the postman coming, the small community, the ties that bind.”
There may be a certain irony for Gleeson in that the play is all about the quiet pint, something the actor no longer feels able to enjoy. He sighs when the subject comes up. “I can’t go into a place any more in terms of pubs, because it turns into selfie country. I really miss [it], particularly going into music sessions. You mightn’t believe me, but people will do amazingly dumb things about interrupting you. I draw the line at funerals.”
I wonder if it’s his roles in global film franchises – in the Harry Potter series he plays Mad-Eye Moody; in the world of Paddington he appears as the winningly abrasive chef Knuckles McGinty – that have made the difference in the past decade. Not so, Gleeson says. It’s the mobile phones and the likelihood of people texting their friends to let them know if Gleeson might be sitting in on a session.
“The mobile phones mean you can do nothing. I’m not an elite musician. I was always running after the bus that way. But before you’d hear of a few quiet tunes somewhere, and you could go and you’d get a couple of hours spare [playing]. Now somebody has texted, and it’s rammed within half an hour.” Does he feel isolated? “I would, certainly. It does make the world smaller. Being able to drop into a place and just do the crossword and talk to somebody, you can’t do it any more.”
A memory surfaces: the opening night of Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk at Galway International Arts Festival in 2015. Following the play, which starred Cillian Murphy, the Gleeson family went with other theatregoers to an after-show gathering at a nearby hotel, where they clustered fireside in the lobby. You could feel the implicit plea from them in the ether: to be allowed to enjoy a night out without being bothered. I did leave them alone, but I will admit it was hard work pretending to ignore them.
Gleeson nods when I mention seeing them. “It’s only the last couple of years I’ve realised it’s uncomfortable for everyone. It alters the equilibrium. So you just say, ‘Okay, I’ve got this far. I’m 70 now, so I should really not be going into those places anyway.’”
Gleeson has the complicating virtue of having come to acting relatively late. Formerly a teacher at Belcamp College in Balgriffin, in north Dublin, Gleeson was 34 when he was cast as Michael Collins in the RTÉ drama The Civil War.
His ascent was far from assured in the early days: casting agents wanted him for character roles, but whether playing the Dublin criminal Martin Cahill in John Boorman’s The General, Mel Gibson’s sidekick in Braveheart or the lead in McDonagh’s Oscar-winning Six Shooter, Gleeson had an ease in front of the camera that meant directors wanted to work with him.
Ask the average Irish person about a Gleeson film and they might mention Hollywood big-budget affairs such as Joker: Folie à Deux or the Sundance TV series State of the Union, for which Gleeson received an Emmy nomination. But they’re just as likely to wax lyrical about home-grown films such as The Guard, directed by John Michael McDonagh, or The Banshees of Inisherin, directed by Martin McDonagh, in which Gleeson riffed beautifully off Farrell as his forlorn former friend.
Then there are the children’s films, such as the glorious Paddington 2, that Gleeson cherishes making. “I grew to like movies as against films,” Gleeson says. “Especially kids’ films. Why would you underestimate children? Their little worlds, their beliefs, when you see kids watching something, their big eyes out on saucers, they’re living this. It’s important, so you do it properly if you can.”
When The Weir transfers to London, Gleeson will spend time with the junior members of the Gleeson tribe. “It’ll be exciting in terms of the lads are over there,” he says. “I’ll get to see my grandkids.”
He doesn’t talk much about his wife or four children, but it’s obvious they’re a tight-knit crew. That last stage performance 10 years ago was with his sons Brian and Domhnall in The Walworth Farce, another of Enda Walsh’s plays. “I find myself asking more and more questions of them and to give me an insight into things I’m blind to or things I don’t quite understand,” he says about their acting skills. He sounds proud of them. “I am.”
Gleeson could big up his sons or name-drop all day if he wanted, but it’s obvious he chooses his words in interviews with care. “I’m moaning a lot,” he says at one stage before course-correcting. It makes it all the more endearing to hear the warm delight in his voice when he occasionally allows in some discussion of his career high points, such as his Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor, for The Banshees of Inisherin in 2023.
“I was thrilled to get an Oscar nomination,” he says. “When I walked in and saw the people that were there in one room. I mean, you’ve Spielberg over there, all these film-makers.”
Gleeson worked with Steven Spielberg on the 2001 film AI Artificial Intelligence, a dystopian tale of robotic intelligence that has more resonance in today’s bot-driven world than ever. The actor has recently been dealing with a deepfake version of himself that has been circulating on the internet, touting a cream that “totally eliminates pain”.
“Two people sent it to me. I’m not on any of that stuff,” he says about social media. “So I was blissfully unaware, and thought it was a joke. But then I realised, ‘Jesus, are they asking people to actually press a link?’ So I just wanted to say that I don’t endorse anything other than support for the hospice.”
Gleeson is a long-time campaigner for improved resources at St Francis Hospice in Raheny, in north Dublin, where both his parents spent their final stages of life; his galvanising social conscience is an important part of his character. It has caused more than one person to question if there’s a role for him in politics. Or, say, in the Áras when the presidential role comes free?
[ ‘I would be dead now if it hadn’t been for the hospice’Opens in new window ]
“I’m quite opinionated,” Gleeson counters. “I just think I’m not a good politician. I can’t get to the place. I love Michael D Higgins for what he’s done, what he’s doing, his reckless energy and his positivity. Everything about what he does fills me with inspiration. I’m not good at that. I do get upset about things that are patently wrong, but I’m not the fixer of those issues. I just hope we can allow people to have a place to live. I think profit-making on homes is immoral.”
If politics is partly about the exchange of ideas, art can spark similarly big conversations. The Weir comes to Dublin at the same time that The Pillowman, by his friend and collaborator McDonagh, runs across town at the Gate Theatre. It’s a controversial play that tackles themes of violence against children. When I tell Gleeson that I found McDonagh’s play tough to watch, his gaze sharpens.
[ The Pillowman review: Anthracite-black comedy. The most appalling crimesOpens in new window ]
“I heard there were people getting upset in the audience,” Gleeson says. “Some people in particular places in their lives may not be able to handle it. Part of art is to face the brutality of the truth. That’s why we keep Auschwitz. The idea of sheltering everybody from horrible consequences, it’s like, if you’ve never been to an abattoir, that’s where you go.
“Early on with Martin, I challenged him on something. I said, ‘Are you just pushing the envelope for its own sake?’ I said you’ve got to really know what you’re doing. And he said, ‘Everything I write is about love.’ I realised with his work you don’t hate anyone; you find the humanity.
“I did the same with John Boorman with The General. You go into a place where you’re saying, ‘This is inhuman.’ No, this is human. This is humanity, I’m afraid.”
Gleeson puts himself through the wringer as an actor. In addition to his work on the forthcoming film adaptation by Emma Donoghue of H Is for Hawk and the TV series Spider-Noir, Gleeson has recently returned from Atlanta, where he was filming The Good Daughter, by the crime author Karin Slaughter. “It was emotionally demanding and traumatising,” he says. “I was wasted when I got back, in a head-space sense.”
The Weir will represent a palate-cleanser. It’s a play that contains quiet truths; that suggests more than it shows. “At the time of life I’m at, and in the zeitgeist where there’s so much apocalyptic desperation, this is a beautiful piece of work,” Gleeson says. “It’s very profound.”
The play is likely to be the hottest ticket in town. Anne Clarke of Landmark Productions, its coproducer, is worried about one thing only: how to distribute the guest-list tickets on opening night. “It’s like Irish theatre royalty,” she says, laughing. “Everybody wants to come. We’re having these big meetings about how we can manage it.”
[ Landmark’s Anne Clarke: ‘Every producer, if they’re honest, is a control freak’Opens in new window ]
As for Gleeson, he’s fretting about his lines. Well, that and the prospect of getting a break at some point. He smiles when he hears a Leonard Cohen lyric: “I ache in the places where I used to play.” Seventy is treating him reasonably well, he says. But the body is creaky sometimes. “I’m wiping the slate clean. I have to take a break. This year and last year was too much. I’ll take time to smell the coffee, because you can run around and not see what you’re looking at.”
Gleeson knows he’s in the right place spiritually, in part because of the distance he has travelled in his life. “I think I was okay as a teacher,” he says. “When I found acting, I just knew. When I was writing down in my passport under occupation, and I wrote down ‘actor’, I felt: I’m home.”
The Weir opens at 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on Wednesday, August 13th, with previews from Friday, August 8th. It runs until September 6th, then transfers to the Harold Pinter Theatre, in London, where it runs from September 12th until December 6th
