McDonagh, Farrell, Gleeson get ‘Bruges’ band back together
NEW YORK ( AP) — “Time be flyin’,” it’s said in Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin.” It’s a sentiment shared by McDonagh and his two stars, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who have reteamed 14 years after McDonagh’s pitch-black feature debut, “In Bruges.”
“It feels like not two days of passing,” McDonagh said, shaking his head, on a recent fall day in New York while Farrell and Gleeson, sitting beside him, eagerly agree.
“It feels like we just went back in the room and said, ‘It’s going to be a good one, isn’t it?” says Gleeson.
The 2008 “In Bruges,” which began the celebrated British-Irish playwright’s transition from stage to screen, was a memorable dark comedy of two hitmen holed up in the medieval Belgian city. For Farrell’s character, who has just accidentally shot a boy on his first job, Bruges is a purgatory. “The Banshees of Inisherin” is likewise set in a specific locale: the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. And a sense of existential doom is again palpable. But the feud this time requires no guns and the rural 1920s backdrop is even more picturesque. After years of friendship and regular trips to the pub together, Colm Doherty (Gleeson) has decided that he just doesn’t like Pádraic Súilleabháin (Farrell) anymore. This confounds Pádraic, who persistently tries to reingratiate himself to Colm. Eventually, Colm decides to make his demand for peace gruesomely clear.
“People go, ‘You can’t just make a film about a guy who doesn’t want to be friends with another guy,’” says Farrell. “Well, that’s how.”
“The Banshees of Inisherin,” which opens in select theaters Friday before expanding nationwide, is a story of friends falling out made by a trio with abiding affection for one another. McDonagh wrote it with Gleeson and Farrell in mind. He first sent the two actors a draft seven years ago. (“That was crap,” says McDonagh. “I loved it,” says Farrell.) He later returned to it, preserving only the first five pages and digging deeper into the pair’s relationship.
McDonagh, Gleeson and Farrell’s pleasure in each other’s company was easy to see when they convened at a hotel on the Upper West Side shortly after Gleeson’s skateboard-shredding “Saturday Night Live” hosting stint. The three had just stepped away from individual interviews over Zoom. “Together again!” they exclaimed.
“From the start, there was a deep sense of kinship and an understanding of each other,” Farrell says. “In a strange way, I understand myself more through Martin and his mind and his heart and his work. And I understand myself more through my interactions with Brendan.”
“I think we all, basically, are romantics,” adds Gleeson. “We’re not blind, either. We know the other side of the coin.”
“In Bruges” was well-received at the time and launched McDonagh as a filmmaker. ( Roger Ebert wrote: “Every once in a while you find a film like this, that seems to happen as it goes along, driven by the peculiarities of the characters.”) But it also has only grown in stature over the years, and it remains a touchstone for all three. Farrell, who was then adjusting to the onset of fame, credits the film with reorienting his career.