Brendan Gleeson takes on Churchill in HBO’s ‘Into the Storm,’ shedding hair, Irish accent

Gleeson goes from Mad Eye Moody to Churchill

LOS ANGELES — Brendan Gleeson doesn’t shirk from acting challenges, veering from the likes of Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter films to an enthusiastic tourist-hit man in “In Bruges.”

But he hesitated before taking on Winston Churchill in HBO’s “Into the Storm.” The film debuts Sunday as the sequel to 2002’s Emmy-winning “The Gathering Storm,” in which Albert Finney played the British leader.

“Winston was a bit of a challenge, all right, from a lot of different perspectives,” Gleeson said.

“It wasn’t just the culture or the class divide or the historical baggage … It was also the age difference. We had to see if I could be aged-up legitimately, without it becoming some sort of hokey acting challenge,” he said.

There were other doubters, as well, who weren’t shy in questioning how an Irish-born actor could convincingly play the English leader. With a laugh, Gleeson recalls a London newspaper headline that followed his casting: “We will fight dem on de beach!”

Gleeson’s Irish accent is banished for “Into the Storm,” which follows Churchill from the height of his World War II power to his peacetime low as a politician in his 70s fretting over election results. Janet McTeer co-stars as Clemmie Churchill, his patient-to-a-point wife.

The top-notch cast includes Len Cariou as President Franklin D. Roosevelt; James D’Arcy and Ian Glen.

Gleeson, 54, said he gained confidence from testing for the role, a safeguard both he and the production wanted, and from intensive work on his accent and on Churchillian-style diction, bearing and even thinning hairline (barbered instead of a skullcap, per Gleeson’s request).

He worked with a voice coach with the goal of suggesting, rather than mimicking, Churchill’s tone and cadence. Gleeson listened to tapes of Churchill’s speeches alongside his versions.

“It’s so strange to hear, in your own mouth, in your own pitch, these modulations. It seems unnatural. So that was the big wall to crash through, really.”

For the scenes between the Churchills, of course, oratory wasn’t appropriate.

“‘I will dry them on the draining boards!’” Gleeson said, offering a domestic parody of the famous line. “That wasn’t gonna happen.”

Another coach helped instruct him in details of aristocratic posture: One foot at a right angle, a “vague echo of a sword-holding stance,” Gleeson said. And, he learned, gentry wait for others to extend their hand in greeting.

Those are elements that have to be “beaten down” into the performance, he said, “so that’s not the note you’re playing all the time.”

Gleeson’s upcoming projects include “Green Zone” with Matt Damon, “Perrier’s Bounty” with Cillian Murphy and Jim Broadbent and the wrap-up of the Potter franchise based on “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

The cosmetic transformation required for Mad-Eye means Gleeson goes unrecognized by young fans.

“Sometimes parents blow it by bringing kids over. The kid is standing there, dumbfounded, saying, ‘Why am I talking to a middle-aged man who has nothing to do with my life?’”

On the Net:

www.hbo.com