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• "Brendan Gleeson Touched By Encounter With Churchill's Daughter"
• Into the Storm: Churchill at War
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Irish actor explains why Churchill was needed during World War II. (2:17)
 

Full interview. (11:46)
 

Tavis: Brendan Gleeson is a Golden Globe-nominated actor who won wide acclaim for his role in last year's comedy, "In Bruges." In his latest project, he takes on a much different role as one of the 20th century's great figures, Winston Churchill. "Into The Storm" takes a look at Churchill's life during World War II. The movie premiers May 31st at 9:00 p.m. on HBO. Here now a scene from "Into the Storm."

[Clip]

Tavis: Brendan, nice to have you on the program.

Brendan Gleeson: Nice to be here, Tavis. Thanks.

Tavis: We saw the precedent to this, "The Gathering Storm."

Gleeson: Yeah.

Tavis: This is "Into the Storm."

Gleeson: Yeah.

Tavis: Winston Churchill ain't the same guy.

Gleeson: He's a stormy guy (laughter). No, I think they asked Albert Finney and Albert wasn't into it, for whatever reason. Also, there's quite a gap, you know, between the two productions, so then they came to me which was kind of an interesting proposal, so I had a little think about that one.

Tavis: When you say you had to think about it - a little think about it - what's the up side - I don't want to say the down side - the challenge to taking over the character that we've seen played by somebody else in the previous version? What's the challenge?

Gleeson: Well, the challenge is, first of all, I was very impressed with "The Gathering Storm." It was one of the reasons, you know, that really tweaked my interest or maintained it a little bit more. But I did get the feeling to say - well, it was particularly the fantastic relationship between Albert and [unintelligible]. It was wonderful and I kind of felt it was a piece.

You know, I had a number of cultural leaps to make, being an Irishman. Playing Churchill was something I had to think about. Also, the age factor there, I had to age up about, you know, 15 to 20 years. So I was a little worried on the number of levels principally that it might be a bridge too far. I might be miscasting myself.

So we had a camera test and it was the drama of the story that became just, you know, unrefusable. It took hold. We did a camera test doing most of the scenes in the script between Clementine, his wife, and Winston and really that's at the heart of it, you know, an old marriage under pressure. So once that started, you know, the ball started rolling a bit for me.

Tavis: As an actor, when you approach a project - to say nothing of a project where you're playing Winston Churchill, one of the great leaders of the 20th century - when you have, by your own admission, reservations going into the project, you see the screen test - and for those who are not into the Hollywood jargon, he goes in and they kind of do a walk-through of this on camera to see how it's going to look.

So you see the screen test. What convinces you then - what lessons do those reservations say to you, "I think I can pull this off now that I've seen the screen test."?

Gleeson: Well, as I said, it was the writing and the drama, the essential drama, that was contained within it. I said, "This is good work." So it was a question of whether I could rise to it or not.

You know, it was a massive task purely because people of a particular generation, certainly of - to mine and possibly younger, are so familiar with the sound of his voice, you know, his whole bearing, his whole demeanor, so there's a certain amount of mimicry involved which is a very dangerous place for an actor to go because mimicry is not enough.

I learned a number of years ago. I did a film called "The General" about a particular criminal in Dublin. John Boorman was the director. He said, "Okay, that's very good mimicry, but it has nothing to do really with what we're about. We need to go farther than that." You know, I guess there are so many challenges that it's difficult to pin it down to one.

But it's important to get all the things that will allow people to stay in the movie. For example, his accent, his look, all those things that allow people to believe it. It's important to have those and then to begin to forget about them and to have it as a human drama. That was the challenge really.

Tavis: I'll come back to the film in just a moment. Give me your take, though, on Winston Churchill. What do you make of this guy that you get a chance to play in this film?

Gleeson: (Laughter) Well, he's extraordinary, you know. He's a nice bunch of fellows, as they say at home. You know, he's so many different people in one and, at the same time, you know, integrity was fairly clear. I think he was a man who followed his lights, that's for sure. He was also somebody who could be a bully. But unlike most bullies, when a bigger bully came along, he stood up to them.

He was a warrior, I mean, fundamentally. He never asked anybody to go into danger. He wouldn't have joyfully gone into it himself almost. It was almost dangerous, his courtship of danger and all that. He saw great glory in war, particularly in his initial manhood.

I suppose the thing that most people rose to was, number one, his honesty with people when things were really bad. He told them how bad the situation had become, what they were facing, and then he said there is no surrender.

Then he moved on to inspire people to be better than they thought they could be. I mean, it takes an extraordinary leader to do that. But like a lot of leaders, and great leaders, it was his time and the period of this movie was his time.

You know, there were so many things that had gone wrong in his career prior to that. He was a forgotten man really, as you saw in "The Gathering Storm," you know, the wilderness years when he had been discounted because he was, you know, a hothead or he was whatever.

So all those qualities he had came together at this particular time because, when this savage was coming over the hill, he was the only person, I think, that could have done what he did.

Tavis: To your point now, and because you have gotten to know him better than most of us, given that you've played him, you talk about his leadership style and the way he became this iconic figure.

Can you just for a second help me, from your perspective, juxtapose his leadership with - I don't mean a particular individual - but what made him stand out versus the kind of leaders we have today? What makes him so uniquely different vis-à-vis his leadership style?

Gleeson: Well, his leadership style could be a disaster. He had, you know, disasters in Gallipoli. He had, you know, campaigns and thoughts and ideas. He had a hundred ideas a day. I mean, I really do think that stubbornness, that aggression, that self-belief - and it wasn't flawless self-belief. He had dark depressions and things like that, nights of the soul. But I really do think that it was at a time when his qualities were most acquired.

I mean, the point was - and it's made in the movies that, you know, he lost the election in 1945. People could not believe how somebody who had led, you know, their country through a war would be voted out of office in that way. But I think the British people at that time understood that the qualities that were necessary in war were not necessarily going to be needed in peace.

So in terms of his leadership at the time, I think it was his irascibility, his absolute determination not to be a slave. That was a massive thing, and his honesty with this people. Then after that, the conviction, as I say, to kind of allow people - I mean, his oration. His love of words was massive, his ability with words.

I mean, in a lot of the speeches that were made that made such a difference in the turning of the war, he would spend an hour per minute. So in other words, an hour of preparation for a minute of speech, and some of those speeches were two hours long.

So he had been a journalist. He was always a wordsmith. He was a writer. He was a Nobel Prize-winner as a writer and words to him were absolutely stupendously important. They were everything and the proper definition and the proper evocative sense of what he was saying, and that's how he stirred peoples' hearts.

But I think the fact that he was honest about it and that he declared problems before they arose, you know, people will only take all great oratory and not discount it as bluster if they're sure that the person delivering it is honest.

Tavis: I don't want to give too much of the project away, but give me the story line for "Into the Storm" versus "The Gathering Storm." The story line here is?

Gleeson: Well, we're not too bad with giving the story away because (laughter) it's in the history books. Basically, it's taken from the period when there was an election in 1945 and there was a delay in announcing the results and Churchill went to France with Clementine, his wife, for a holiday and to try to recoup from what the war had done.

So it's basically taken in that section. Their marriage was tested in a way that was possibly the worst time ever because it appeared to be at an end and yet he wanted to keep going.

So the movie takes it from that period of time and goes back through the tribulations of the war and how they had come to that point, you know, and through his glory years of 1940 and 1941 and then through where he was slightly sidetracked when Stalin and Roosevelt tended to push him to one side near the end of the war.

Fundamentally, the kernel of it is the relationship between himself and Clementine, his wife, and what it had cost him, I guess, the dynamism of his leadership.

Tavis: Some of that is why I asked the question. Some of that is in the history books, but we tend to read and learn more about Churchill, the statesman, than the personal side, the relationship side. That's a fascinating part of the story that I think a lot of people may not know.

Gleeson: Again, it was one of the things we were talking about earlier in terms of why it was so seductive as a project is because it was about real people. You know, Hugh Whitemore wrote it and has been married a long time and understood an old marriage (laughter).

Honestly, I thought it was quite beautiful in its tracking of the relationship and it's quite tough on the relationship. It shows the, you know, warts and all. They were in trouble at one time. But I think ultimately it's fantastically life-enhancing, the way that they manage to work through it.

Tavis: So given the challenges of playing a larger than life sort of figure, I want to end our conversation where we began. You had reservations, for different reasons. You had reservations about playing this larger than life figure before you played him. Now that you've done it, would you play another larger than life figure?

Gleeson: Oh, yeah. I love playing larger than life figures. I mean, the odd thing was, I'd played Michael Collins who was an Irish revolutionary who sat on the treaty negotiations about the Irish independence across from Churchill, so I've kind of sat at both sides of that particular table, and the switch in perspective is great.

The great thing about playing historical characters for me as an actor anyway is that normally you have to kind of organize a suspension of disbelief with regard to how things happened and what things happened. When you have an historical character, the things have already happened and, always, truth is stranger than fiction. So you have that suspension of disbelief out there. What you need to do is just inhabit it and that's what the great challenge of it is.

Tavis: You did a great job inhabiting it.

Gleeson: Thank you.

Tavis: His name is Brendan Gleeson. The project is "Into the Storm" on HBO. An honor to have you here.

Gleeson: Thanks a lot, Tavis. Lovely to be here. Thank you.

Tavis: Nice to see you. It's my pleasure.