February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
But he also says it was ultimately such a great challenge he couldn’t resist tackling it.
“Into the Storm” is a sequel to the 2002 teleplay, “The Gathering Storm,” which starred Albert Finney as Churchill and followed the life of the famous historic figure up to the point where he was appointed England’s First Lord of the Admiralty following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.
The second installment, in which Gleeson portrays the main character, focuses largely on Churchill’s actions as prime minister, his rousing political speeches and his close relationship with his wife Clementine through World War II. Both movies were written by Hugh Whitemore, and produced by Tony and Ridley Scott. The second film was directed by Dublin-born filmmaker Thaddeus O’Sullivan, who previously made “Ordinary Decent Criminal,” a caper inspired by the life of infamous Irish criminal Martin Cahill and released shortly after Gleeson’s Cahill bio-pic “The General” hit theaters.
Asked to describe his reaction when he first heard the “Storm” filmmakers wanted him to play Churchill, Gleeson laughed and recalled saying to himself, “I don’t think so.”
So, what convinced him to take a stab at it?
“I had a look at ‘The Gathering Storm,’ which was the precursor to this one,” the 54-year-old former school teacher told the Irish Echo in a recent telephone interview. “It was tremendous . . . and this was the same people doing it. It was a serious production. So, then I began to think about it and we did a camera test just to see how it would feel and Thaddeus and myself went down to the Grand Hotel in Malahide and we did a number of scenes with . . . a fantastic Irish actress over there, just going through some of the Clemmie scenes and it became dramatically very interesting. So, I had another think about it and we decided to take the plunge.”
O’Sullivan remarked that he wanted to re-fresh the whole idea of Winston Churchill, and not pick somebody who was overly familiar in roles like that. “So, we started immediately looking and thinking a bit outside of the box,” he said. “And we didn’t have to think for too long. Gleeson’s name came up quickly.”
Although the “Storm” project provided Gleeson with one of his most ambitious and highest-profile roles to date, the actor said he wouldn’t call himself an admirer of the real-life British politician, who was one of the negotiators, along with Irish revolutionary Michael Collins, of the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed in 1921.
“No, not at all,” Gleeson replied when asked if he was a Churchill fan before depicting him on the small screen.
“I played Collins in a TV movie called ‘The Treaty’ in 1991, so I would have been on the opposite side of the table, and it wasn’t a good time for those relationships,” he continued. “So, I wouldn’t have been an unbridled fan, put it that way. But everybody knows what Churchill did in World War II. The complexity of it was part of the attraction. Part of it compromised even how I felt myself about the whole thing and I figured I could learn a little bit . . . I guess that’s what we’re supposed to do.”
Best known for his roles in the films “Braveheart,” “Michael Collins” and “In Bruges,” Gleeson went on to say he found the Churchill character difficult to get into because the former leader was so different from himself.
“The key to it was the voice, really. The rest of it is just physical things, ordinary challenges that you have. But the voice was always going to be difficult because it is so iconic and so recognizable and so imbedded in people’s heads,” explained the recent Golden Globe nominee. “Whether I could get that cultural leap right without it sounding just like pure mimicry or just melding words that didn’t mean anything – that was the biggest difficulty. So, once we got the voice under control and I felt like I could speak as a human being in that particular voice, I kind of felt the challenge was on. But that was the big, intimidating one.”
The fact Gleeson is 20 years younger than Churchill was at the time the film takes place presented another obstacle for the actor to overcome, he said.
“That can be hokey if you don’t do it properly,” he noted. “I was a little bit concerned that we get it right. There were a few kind of big jumps to make.”
Gleeson said he also spent time studying newsreels and working with a body language coach in an effort to accurately capture the way Churchill moved and expressed himself.
“She pointed out a few things that were fascinating,” Gleeson said of the coach. “For the most part, they were little footnotes, but they were hugely important. Just certain mannerisms that would have been consistent with the aristocracy at that time. . . Those kind of class things were fantastic. I got a great kick out of all that stuff, learning about that.”
The long-married father of four sons said he found it easy to leave the character behind once the cameras stopped rolling.
“Yeah,” he chuckled. “It’s the kind of actor I am. I’m not a Stanislavski guy, really. It was very much a role. You’re left with a kind of affection for somebody you play, no matter what. It’s like having kids or something . . . You’re left with a perspective on the world that is partly theirs, or what you assume to have been theirs or what you decided was theirs at the time. And you kind of do end up somewhere in their corner. So, there is kind of a little proprietorial feeling in the end when you read quotes from him, as if in some way you’d made them up yourself.”
Co-starring Janet McTeer, James D’Arcy and Patrick Malahide, “Into the Storm” is set to air May 31 on HBO.