The surprising 2017 movie Brendan Gleeson calls his only perfect film: “I’m as proud of that as anything”
Some actors have a handy knack of acting like a kind of stamp of quality on a movie whenever you see them pop up.
Whether or not they’re just good at picking scripts or directors is one thing, but their performance is always great, no matter the genre; they elevate films through it, and Brendan Gleeson is definitely one of those actors.
He’s also doing it on the smaller screen now in stuff like the excellent Nicolas Cage superhero show Spider-Noir, and he smashed it in three seasons of the Stephen King thriller Mr Mercedes, too. But then he’s been honing his craft for quite some time now, longer than people think to be honest; if you said he was in Braveheart, that might seem far-fetched, because that was ages ago.
It was 1995 in fact, so three decades ago, but Gleeson was 40 by that point, his professional acting career not really having started until he was 34. So it only took him six years to go from amateur theatre in Dublin to a Mel Gibson blockbuster, which is impressive enough. After that, he appeared under some of the best directors in the business: Scorsese on Gangs of New York, Danny Boyle on 28 Days Later, and Spielberg on A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
But it was probably the beginning of his partnership with Martin McDonagh that saw the beginning of his best work, which so far has lasted more than 20 years. McDonagh first cast Gleeson in his short film Six Shooter in 2004, which won an Academy Award, and then again in the brilliant In Bruges four years later. But it was 2022’s The Banshees of Inisherin, which proved the most successful for Gleeson as he picked up an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
That isn’t the film he’s appeared in that he rates the most highly, however. That honour would go to 2017’s Paddington 2, the film that, while admittedly very good, for some reason took on a kind of hipster badge of honour as a work of genius, and has remained at the top of many people’s lists as one of the best movies ever (it isn’t).
Gleeson agrees with those people, however, responding: “They’re absolutely right though. That is a perfect movie! Honestly, I’m as proud of that as anything I’ve done.”
The talking bear sequel also features Hugh Grant as a master of disguise and was an enormous hit on release, bringing in $290million on a budget of just $40m. Gleeson plays Knuckles McGinty, resident chef at Portobello prison, where Paddington ends up after he’s framed for stealing from an antique shop, and he recruits the anthropomorphic ursine to help him launch an escape from the jail.
Gleeson will next be seen in November of this year in a TV series called The Good Daughter, alongside Rose Byrne, with whom he first appeared in Brad Pitt’s epic Troy in 2004. It’s an adaptation of a best-selling Karin Slaughter novel, telling the story of two estranged sisters who suffered a traumatic break-in as kids, forced to deal with another act of violence many years later. Byrne has also appeared with Gleeson’s son Domhnall in two Peter Rabbit movies, in which they try not to kill the rabbit for being voiced by James Corden.
