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Pierce Brosnan may be a native Irishman. But for his Paramount+ series “MobLand,” he needed to find a new accent to play gangster patriarch Conrad Harrigan.
“I have enormous fun with Conrad,” he said. “He found me at the right time in life. Last summer, [director] Guy Ritchie sent me five episodes. I sat here on the Lanai looking at the chickens and I read them. I love Guy Ritchie’s work. It’s just so exhilarating to see his films. I jumped in and said yes. On that particular day of saying yes, I started talking about the character of Conrad with him. I know he has an Irish family. He said, ‘Listen, don’t worry about it. Put it out of your mind. We’ll sort it out on the day in 15 minutes.’ I said, ‘I just want to clarify, Guy. Fifteen minutes, put it out of my mind on the day, I can do that.’ Of course, I didn’t do that. Then you sit back and you worry and you prepare.”
On the first day of shooting with co-star Tom Hardy, who plays the Harrigan family’s fixer Harry Da Souza, Brosnan finally found his perfect accent, inspired his own father.
“Literally on the day, five weeks later, I was with Guy and he said, ‘Go more Irish. More Irish.’ It was a scene with Tom,” he said. “It was our first scene together, a three-page scene. It is your first day and the nerves and the excitement is charging through your veins. My Irish accent is such a soft, soft brogue. And I wanted a Kerry accent. My old man, Tom Brosnan, came from Kerry — I didn’t know the fella. I spoke to my dialect coach, Brendan Gunn, and I said, ‘Give me a Kerry accent.’ And he did. He showed me the work of this Irish politician, and more or less in the space of 20 minutes, I just dove in with this kind of rather biting, crazy Kerry accent like some pig farmer.”
Brosnan’s co-star Helen Mirren, who plays his wife Maeve, chimed in to give her support on his accent: “Brilliantly, I have to say. A pig farmer who’s actually spent a lot of time in London. There is a bit of London in there, too. There is a big community in London of Irish people and a lot of very specific Irish pubs and Irish traditions in London.”
As for Mirren, she drew from her past role on “1923” to hone in on her own Irish accent.
“I had a sort of similar trajectory,” she explained. “I thought, ‘These Irish people, they’ve lived in London for generations, so obviously they talk with North London accents. I arrive on my first-day shoot thinking, ‘I’ll do a bit of London.’ Then Pierce says, ‘No, no, no, we are doing Irish.’ But luckily I’d just done Cara in ‘1923,’ who was Irish. So the accent was still very present in my mind and I could slip into it quite quickly. But it was funny. That was the name of the game with ‘MobLand.’ It was this fabulous do-it-on-the-spot intention. It was very exciting.”
English (US) ·