Pierce Brosnan learned Irish accent in twenty minutes for ‘MobLand’
Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren joke about character study for “MobLand” and how they perfected their accents for it in a short amount of time.
“MobLand” Season 2 has finally been fired from the chamber on Paramount+ (now streaming), bringing back two of Hollywood’s most refined and polished stars – 007 himself, Pierce Brosnan, and Dame Helen Mirren – as foul-mouthed gangster power couple Conrad and Maeve Harrigan.
The Guy Ritchie-produced drama delivers the wild sights of the decidedly senior crime-family heads starting a South London dog-track gunfight – and Maeve (Mirren) digging the bullet out of her shirtless husband Conrad (Brosnan) with pliers, the ultimate sign of enduring gangster-couple love.
“We are the Harrigans!” Conrad proclaims amid the bloodshed. “You’ve been warned.”
And that’s just the first half of Episode 1.
Dressed in a natty Brunello Cucinelli suit next to the resplendent Mirren, 81, during a joint USA TODAY interview, Brosnan, 73, says they love the madness.
“That was on our first day of work. Bigger acting, bigger performances,” Brosnan says proudly of the home surgery scene. “Helen and I are having the time of our lives playing these characters. Guy Ritchie came bearing gifts for both of us. We grabbed the proverbial bull by the horns and ran with it.”
There’s little proverbial thrown around in the expletive-filled gangster dialogue, especially the jarringly frequent C-word from creator Ronan Bennett (“The Day of the Jackal”) and lead writer Jez Butterworth (“Ford v Ferrari,” “Spectre”).
“There’s a lot of the ‘C’-word, and the ‘F’-word and the ‘B’-word and every other word,” Mirren says. “That’s part of the poetry.”
“We’d never want to cut any of it,” Brosnan adds. “It’s so well embroidered and heightened.”
The role requires Brosnan to mangle one of Hollywood’s most famous heads of hair to play the gangster in winter, holding onto power with a family that includes de facto son and fixer Harry Da Souza (Tom Hardy), volatile biological son Kevin Harrigan (Paddy Considine) and Kevin’s formidable wife, Bella (Lara Pulver).
Brosnan personally oversaw his hair butchering – the follicular equivalent of Alderaan exploding in “Star Wars” for the the Bond-verse.
“We wanted something that had this kind of fascist look,” Brosnan says. “Something that would dissemble this old mug and this head of hair I’ve been graced with.”
The couple sport heavy Irish accents, which Ireland-born Brosnan took on after mulling variations of London accents. On Day 1 of the 2024 London set, Ritchie told Brosnan, whose father was from County Kerry, Ireland, to just go Irish.
“That was 20 minutes before the first shot,” says Brosnan, who rang his dialect coach and quickly modeled the accent from YouTube videos of Irish politician Michael Healy. “I wandered around this field for 20 minutes with this accent and then we shot the scene.”
“I heard he’d gone Irish, so that meant I had to go Irish,” says Mirren. “And there we were.”
The accent has taken hits from Irish pundits. But Brosnan has the roots, and didn’t think of tweaking the full-throated Irish brogue for Season 2. “No, no, I’ve stuck to my accent,” Brosnan says.
“It’s an incredibly specific accent, to basically a five-mile radius of a certain part of Kerry where they speak exactly that accent,” Mirren says, looking at Brosnan. “And that’s where your Daddy came from, isn’t it?”
Like Brad Pitt’s famously indecipherable Irish accent in Ritchie’s “Snatch,” the “MobLand” accents work in this new outrageous world, where going over the top is house style.
Brosnan and Mirren discuss ‘maelstrom of lies and … ridiculousness’ about costar Tom Hardy
The long release of “Mobland” Season 2 has been overshadowed by May reports of behind-the-scenes drama involving the famously intense Hardy allegedly clashing with producers. The reports stated the pivotal TV family fixer would not return for the upcoming Season 3.
Like the head of any crime family, Brosnan brushes off the drama that he first heard while on vacation.
“I was gutted when I read the news, I was just floored that we would lose Tom,” Brosnan says. “Tom’s a great actor and a great presence and he is ‘MobLand.’ We are collectively ‘MobLand.’ I reached out to him to say, ‘I hope this is not true. I love you dearly.’ And then it began to whip into a frenzy. I still don’t know to this day where the misinformation came from.”
In May, Mirren posted a photo of Hardy on Instagram with the caption, “Love you now and always.” Mirren blames the furor on the internet gone rogue.
“Nowawdays with the Internet and everything it kind of becomes a madhouse, like in seconds or days,” says Mirren. “It was getting out of control and we instinctively and independently reached out. We had to say what we thought in this maelstrom of lies and innuendo and ridiculousness.”
Hardy was confirmed to return for Season 3 on Sept. 3 and was all smiles and hugs at the Sept. 10 London premiere, warmly embracing his “MobLand” co-stars. Cue up the TV madness when shooting starts all over again in the fall.
“It’s always a jump into the deep end and you hope for the best,” Mirren says. “When we started the series, we had no idea what the scripts were going to be, where it would go. Season 2 was another adventure into the unknown. Likewise into Season 3.”
“We’re just waiting in the wings like everyone else to see what unfolds on the page,” Brosnan says.
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