Showing his chops
Gleeson kills in violent Irish mob drama ‘The Kitchen’
Aviolent, dark look at the Irish mafia in New York’s late ’70s Hell’s Kitchen, “The Kitchen” is topped by three formidable women — Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss.
Yet Dublin’s Domhnall (pronounced like “tonal” with a D) Gleeson easily makes his mark as Gabriel, a Vietnam vet who helps the trio dispose of bodies, fight for their illegal loot and stay alive.
Is “Kitchen” a popcorn movie? A serious examination of the period’s misogynism, racism, violence?
“Everything is in there,” said this successful secondgeneration actor (“ExMachina,” “Brooklyn,” “Star Wars”) whose dad is Emmy winner Brendan (“Into the Storm,” “In Bruges”).
“It was funny. When I first talked to Andrea (Berloff, the writer-director), having read her script, I told her I was having a hard time trying to place it in my head, as to exactly what it was. Andrea said, ‘I don’t want to place it as any one thing. It’s going to be its own thing.’
“It’s got a feeling you can’t compare to different films. It’s very cool, very hip, very funny. I don’t know, it’s hard to describe. Like the personalities of the three women, it’s not one thing.”
Gleeson’s Gabriel falls in love with Moss’ Claire, an abused housewife who vows
never to be beaten again.
If they are a helluva twosome, Gabriel owns the film’s most memorable moment. With a nude male murder victim in the bathtub, he offers a show and tell to the women on how to dismember a corpse with a hunting knife, the easier to bag body parts to dump in the river.
“Gabriel just sees it as his job. And he’s good at it,” Gleeson, 36, figured. “That’s part of what I liked about him.
“In my real life I wouldn’t want to know him or meet him. Just based on his track record you wouldn’t want to end up in his bathtub. But I thought if I could just be matter-of-fact and not wanting it to be too gruesome, it would be fine.
“You don’t see blood or what’s happening, you see the reactions of the people around that tells you what’s going on. I thought that was funny.
“They’re such a weird couple, Gabriel and Claire,” he added. “I thought it was a wonderful way for them to fall in love. Everyone else, their eyes meet across a crowded bar. And their eyes meet across a bloody bathtub.”