Brendan Gleeson stars in The Guard (From York Press)

Brendan Gleeson stars in The Guard

12:06pm Wednesday 31st August 2011 in Film reviews By Charles Hutchinson

BRENDAN Gleeson, one-time secondary schoolteacher turned actor, is not yer typical leading man.

Hence the thick-set Irishman is perfectly suited to his latest role as Garda Gerry Doyle, the guard of the title in John Michael McDonagh’s Irish comedy-thriller The Guard, now showing at City Screen, York.

McDonagh sums up Doyle succinctly as: “An eccentric individual with a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes and a heightened sense of the absurd.” In other words, he is not exactly yer regular hero.

“He’s not, no, and that’s the reason I liked the role,” says Dubliner Brendan. “I don’t think we’ve seen him before, to be honest. I couldn’t wait to get at him.”

After alternating between blockbusters and indie hits – Braveheart and the Harry Potter franchise on the one hand, the cult black comedy In Bruges on the other – Brendan is topping the credits list in The Guard.

He is playing an unconventional Irish policeman who joins forces with Don Cheadle’s straight-laced FBI agent to crack an international drug smuggling gang on the wild coastline of Connemara, west Galway.

Is it good judgement or good fortune that has helped Gleeson pick such plum roles? “I’m dead lucky, sure, just look at me... to be blessed with these looks,” he says, deadpan to the maximum. “No – I do work at it. I don’t do rubbish. If I know it’s going to be rubbish at the beginning, I’m not doing it.

“But that’s not to say it won’t turn out to be rubbish in the end, because it’s really hard to make a film from start to finish and not lose it somewhere along the way. There are so many pitfalls.”

A different reasoning lay behind Brendan taking on the role of Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, the Hogwarts professor killed by Voldemort in the first of the Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows films.

“The reason I instantly took it was that the car erupted [in cheers] when my boys heard. There was no question, you have to do this, so that’s why I got into it,” he recalls.

Next up for 56-year-old Brendan is his directorial debut, At Swim-Two-Birds, based on the 1939 novel by Irish author Flann O’Brien about a writer whose life begins to blur with those of the fictional characters he has dreamed up.

Brendan insists he will not be giving up acting any time soon, however.

“I really do love what I’m doing. I feel like it’s what I have to offer,” he says. “I’ve directed plays and things before, but only when I’ve felt that I was very proprietorial about the material and wanted my own particular vision.

“With this book, I’ve loved it since I was 17 and when the rights came up, I took them, not quite knowing what I was going to do with them. It’s become an obsession for the last seven years.”

• Did you know?

Brendan Gleeson won an Emmy for his performance as Sir Winston Churchill in the BBC2 biopic Into The Storm.