At the age of 71, when many actors have retired or their agents aren’t calling offering work, Brendan Gleeson is busier than ever.
His film, H is for Hawk, which has recently been released on Netflix, is based on a true story about a woman who looks after her father’s hawk following his death.
He is in The Good Daughter, an upcoming American television series, based on the book of the same name by Karin Slaughter and co-starring Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy. He is also in Spider Noir, an American superhero TV series for Amazon Prime, and the film version of Conor McPherson’s play The Weir is due for release later this year, which transports the award-winning cast from the London West End production to Ireland. Gleeson received the Best Actor award at the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards in London for his performance during the play’s run last year.
He is happy that he plays positive male role models in H is for Hawk and in The Good Daughter. “H is for Hawk is such a relief from all the bad Daddys we have to deal with all the time. It’s just interminable sort of stuff about men being responsible for all the sins of the world.
“We can blame our Daddys too if we wanted. I felt there are a lot of men going around who need positive reinforcement about the nature of parenthood and fatherhood. It’s actually a good thing, and you miss them when they are not there.”
The father he plays in The Good Daughter is a “decent man” who has his faults.
Is he thinking of retirement? “I thought I was going to do it this year. I thought I was going to take it easy, but you are always going to find something.
“I want to spend a little bit more time with my grandkids and I want to smell the coffee before I depart the mortal coil, so to speak.
“Once we finished The Weir, I was wasted out and stopped for a good few months. Now I’m starting to think about getting back on the horse again.”
He says he “loves working” and still gets the same excitement when he reads a script that he likes. “There’s always going to be something going on … but I’m not tearing around after things either,” he says. “I won’t do something for the sake of it any more, but I’m still curious.”
For many years, Gleeson has leveraged his fame to help fundraise for St Francis Hospice in Raheny. “In terms of recognisability for what I do, I appreciate it is a price I pay. I felt if I could do anything for anybody, it would be for St Francis.”
His mother Pat, who died in 2007, and his father Frank, who died in 2010, spent their final days in the hospice.
“I was very attached to my Mam and to see her shoulders relax as she was been taking care of here, and the practicality and the professionalism and the kindness of people, it invited death into the room,” he said.
“The confrontation of death and mortality and the understanding of how it works is something I felt was life-affirming in a massive way, and my Dad followed the same path.”
St Francis Hospice has broken ground on a new in-patient unit accommodating 24 single-patient rooms.
Gleeson is backing a multimillion-euro campaign to support the development, which will provide care for an additional 3,000 patients over the next 25 years.
The extension will cost €10.4 million. With €3 million already donated by philanthropists, the hospice is still faced with the prospect of raising €7.4 million to complete the job. The public are invited to buy a brick for €25, €100, or €250.
Gleeson says the extension will give families and their loved ones more privacy at the time of death.
“What I love about the hospice [model] is that they constantly want to make things better, improving privacy and going to huge amounts of effort to make that happen,” he said.