The time has come for Brendan Gleeson. Having made an indelible mark playing supporting characters in movies from Into The West to Braveheart to Michael Collins, the Irish actor finally moves into a starring role on the big screen in I Went Down, at the age of 42. If that seems like a long time to have to wait before landing a leading role, it isn't, when you consider that Gleeson has only been acting professionally for eight years. However, he has done so much and so well in that relatively short period that it seems like he has been on our screens for much longer.
At present he's immersed in another important leading role, playing Martin Cahill, the murdered Dublin criminal known as "The General", in John Boorman's drama, I Once Had A Life, which is now filming. And he has a key role as the reformatory school priest in Neil Jordan's film of The Butcher Boy, which opens here next spring.
First there is I Went Down, which has its Irish premiere in Dublin next Thursday night and goes on release across the country on the following day. An exuberant, blackly humorous road movie, I Went Down follows the misadventures of two inept minor Dublin convicts who find within themselves the resources to prove their mettle under pressure. The younger of the pair is the aptly named Git Hynes, played by Peter McDonald, with Brendan Gleeson cast as the oilslick-coiffed Bunny Kelly - he reads cowboy novels on their way down to Cork where they're despatched by a Dublin gangster (Tony Doyle) to track down a criminal associate (Peter Caffrey).
The snowballing complications which ensue make for boisterous, sharply scripted and expletive-littered comedy with a truly dark edge and unpredictable twists and turns. I Went Down marks a potent cinema debut for its screenwriter, the young Irish playwright Conor McPherson, and an assured second cinema feature for director Paddy Breathnach after the underestimated Ailsa. It is well placed to be the most successful indigenous movie of the year at the Irish box-office, as it deserves to be. Cutting a tall, imposing figure in a dark suit and collarless white shirt, Brendan Gleeson was in affable form when we met last weekend on one of his days off from playing Martin Cahill. Because he is midway through shooting the Boorman film and he feels so close to it, he prefers not to discuss it in any detail at this point. "I would enjoy talking to you about it later," he says. "I think it's going to be a really interesting film."
However, he is effusive in his enthusiasm for I Went Down, as he recalls his first meeting with Breathnach, McPherson and the film's producer, Rob Walpole. "It hopped off the page when I read it," he says. "It was kind of risky at first because when I get really excited about something I tend to rabbit on at length and make all kinds of suggestions for improvement, and that can be very threatening to some people. "But the lads were very responsive and interested in playing around with the ideas, so it went very well. We had a chat for about an hour and we could have gone on for hours. I knew I wasn't the only person they were interested in at the time, so I was delighted when it came through. I went at it bald-headed, which is what I tend to do."
He describes his character, Bunny Kelly, as a joy. "What can you say? It's such a gift for an actor to have a character like that. It's so zany and so human. I worried all the time if I was doing too much with the character. He was so accessible from the page that to overblow it would have been a serious danger."
Working with the movie's young key team, he was struck by just how cinematically aware they all were, far more so than he would have been at the same age, he admits. "It felt different, and very fresh, and I got a really strong feeling that we now have an industry that has bedded in and that is confident within itself. We've gone through the apprentice stage. There was so much retrospective film-making that had to be done because there had been such a gap for so long, and I'm glad that that was done and continues to be done."
He had no qualms about sharing so many of his scenes in I Went Down with his relatively inexperienced co-star, Peter McDonald. "He comes from a theatrical background, but his awareness of the cinema is immense, and it was a joy working with him. There was never any sense of competition going on, just a case of how good can we make the film - a complete lack of egos bashing against each other on the set, which was such a relief. That's not necessarily to be critical of other productions. Sometimes there can be creative visions that clash, which has nothing to do with vanity, but with different perceptions of where the film is at."
Brendan Gleeson has been married to his wife, Mary, for 16 years, and they have four children. He was born in Artane on the north side of Dublin and from the age of four, whenever asked what he wanted to be, he replied, "an actor". "At school I had this fantastic Christian Brother, Pat Grogan, who put on concerts, really ambitious things, and they were a fantastic theatrical experience to be in," he says. "When we left school - Joeys in Fairview - a few of us started a drama group and that's where the acting started. I went to college and met Paul Mercier. Then I went teaching for about 10 years, during which I got involved with the Passion Machine."
Before teaching English and Irish in Belcamp, Gleeson directed a production of The Scatterin' which Joe Dowling, then artistic director at the Abbey, saw and admired, inviting Gleeson to audition at the Abbey. "I was expecting to be on stage," the actor recalls. "Instead there were three people sitting about two feet away from my face. I had great confidence on a stage, but I was seriously freaked to have three people so close at an audition. I got a very bad feel for it. They said, `Go down to the Project', but I never did."
He said that he had this notion that acting was something for other people, but not for him. "I didn't believe this world could incorporate me in any way except as an observer. And I don't think it had anything to do with lack of confidence, because I remember seeing plays when I was 17, 18, and thinking `I would have done that a different way'."
In 1989, greatly encouraged by Paul Mercier, his playwright friend, Brendan Gleeson decided at the age of 34 that it time to make or break. He quit teaching for acting. "Paul is fantastic," he says. "He knows no fear. He would put on a play in the SFX with money raised by himself and John Sutton, and he would fill the place. That was really fortuitous for me because, without his vision and his courage, I don't think I would have ever made the leap."
When Mercier made his first film debut as a writer and director this year with the half-hour movie, Before I Sleep, Gleeson played the leading role as a recently unemployed middle-class Dubliner in a state of quiet anxiety.
Brendan Gleeson's professional debut came in Garry Hynes's production of Eugene O'Neill's King Of The Castle at the Abbey. "It was an eye-opener," he says, "with so many questions about layers of meaning that brought me places I hadn't gone before. And I felt: this is where it's at." So began a prolific career that displayed the actor's versatility as he moved smoothly between theatre, television and cinema.
"I was lucky," he says. "And one thing I refused to allow myself do was to wait for any phone calls. I understood going in that I couldn't bear to wait by the phone. And it's gone really well. And I think because I started so late that there was a kind of urgency about the way I learned my trade. I had so much to learn in front of the camera that I scrutinised everything when I was working."
He recalls an early role in Glenroe. "I went into it as Fiona's beau for a while - I think he headed off to Kenya or somewhere, as these people tend to do!" he laughs. "But they were great people there. I learned to hit marks. They let me into the editing room. I was looking at different cuts and then I saw myself and I thought, `Oh, God, I don't believe what I'm seeing here. It's hideous. I can't watch this!'."
His most substantial television role was playing Michael Collins in the impressive RTE production, The Treaty, in which he was every inch The Big Fella. Was he very disappointed not to be cast as Collins when Neil Jordan made his Irish historical epic two years ago? "Well, I wasn't at that stage in my career for such a part," he comments. "I felt Liam (Neeson) had gone over to America on his own and had worked his way into a position where he was going to be offered it. I hadn't done that yet. Therefore I felt no resentment towards him. I still wanted to be part of it, so I took a role in it. Liam was incredibly generous on the set. I didn't know him and the first day on the set he comes along and says `How's the real Michael Collins? I'm going to be picking your brains on this'."
I Went Down opens on Friday.