Brendan Gleeson: ‘I’ve never grown up but I do feel death frames life’

He’s approaching 70, but Brendan Gleeson doesn’t feel his age. “I don’t think I ever grew up really.I’ve always been young at heart.”
The actor, from Dublin, believes the trick to staying fresh is to find something that ignites your imagination.
“Sometimes the world seems tired, but the fact is you’re tired. In reality, there’s always something wonderful to see, somewhere in the world, life is too amazing, and that makes you forget the creaky bits,” he tells The Sunday Times.
For Gleeson, an Emmy winner, Oscar nominee and five-time Golden Globe nominee, that thing is acting. He has no intention of throwing in the towel just yet, but he has become more particular about the parts he plays. “What I try to do is not to take on projects that have potential, rather than actuality,” he says. “I used to take more of a chance years ago, if I felt a role was worth a shot. But now I know that most things will end up the way they start. I’m trying to only work with people that excite me and, or with writing that excites me, and that definitely keeps me young.”
He’s had brushes with death, and recalls an incident when he was a student hitch-hiking in Germany, and tried to cross an autobahn. “A car travelling at 140 miles an hour came out of nowhere. There was a moment and I remember thinking, ‘That was close’.”
Incidents such as these remind him that life is fleeting, and make him more appreciative of it as result. “I’ve always felt that death frames life, in a way.”
Gleeson is speaking in Bewley’s café on Grafton Street at a coffee morning in support of a nationwide fundraising campaign for hospices. It’s a cause that’s close to his heart, as both his parents died at St Francis Hospice in Raheny. His mother, Pat, was 83 when she died in 2007 and his father, Francis, was 92 in 2010. “We do post-death really well [in Ireland], but maybe not pre-death, and that’s where the whole idea of the hospice comes in and why I got involved with it,” Gleeson says.
He was impressed by the staff at the hospice and how they dealt with the process of dying, he says. “Invariably I felt invigorated by the people there, by the compassion, their professionalism and the vitality of their attack about an issue that has to be embraced.”
Althouh Gleeson recalls both his parents with great fondness, he says that his father struggled to understand his acting career. “My father really didn’t know what to make of it. He apparently said to someone after I went full time, ‘Brendan’s messing around with the acting’. He just couldn’t compute what I was doing at all. Before that, when I used to go to Germany busking as a student, he told a colleague that I was begging on the streets,” he adds, laughing.
He describes his father as “stoic’, a conservative man who could be funny in an offbeat way. “He made my mother laugh a lot.”
His father was the youngest in a family dominated by girls, and liked the company of women. “He was a woman’s man,” Gleeson says, clarifying that he doesn’t mean lady’s man. “He functioned better in female company.”
Gleeson’s four sons also had a good relationship with his father. He recalls a time when one of them, Fergus, was visiting Francis and helping to get him ready for bed. “He used to have five or six things that he’d count out and put on the bedside table, including his comb, and he used to comb his hair before he got into bed. One night, Fergus asked him why. He said, ‘You never know who you might meet in your dreams’. Isn’t that lovely?”
Gleeson made the transition from secondary school teacher to full-time actor when he was 35 and credits Mary, his wife — now of 42 years — for encouraging him to do it. “It wouldn’t have happened without her,” he says. “At that stage, the dye was cast, but I always said I wouldn’t get to 35 and regret things so approaching it, I thought I really should see if I could do it.”
He’s remembering his father again, and recalls him saying towards the end: “You seem to know what you’re doing.”
Playing Donald Trump on television in The Comey Rule in 2020 was a challenge, though. He’s never met Trump, but given the former president’s public image and the politics associated with it, Gleeson deliberated about accepting the part. “I thought I really should do it because, at some previous time, I’d felt I could play him,” he says. “I also knew that I had to approach it in a way that was fair, as in any other character. There’s an awful lot of baggage [with such a role]. It’s like going in and you’re the jury and the case has already been dismissed.”
Gleeson is about to start work on Amazon’s Spiderman Noir TV series, and will shoot it in Los Angeles. “I didn’t like being away from home too much when the kids were young,” he says. “But now Mary comes with me. We can go over there and live while I work. Before, I’d go over and wait to come back to live.”
He also stars as a prison guard in the new film Joker: Folie à Deux, drawn to the role having been impressed by the 2019 Joker, which starred Joaquin Phoenix. “It was stunning! I thought it was one of the best performances I’d ever seen,” he says. “When I got the call, I really wanted to be a part of it because Todd Phillips was directing again, and it was the same set-up.”
Register to host a coffee morning on Thursday, September 26, or a date that suits you, at hospicecoffeemorning.ie or call 0818 995 996. If you cannot host or attend a coffee morning, you can make a donation at hospicecoffeemorning.ie/donate