‘Into the Storm’ continues Churchill story
Brendan Gleeson plays leader in HBO sequel
Published: May 29, 2009, 12:30 am
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Irish actor Brendan Gleeson is a big, strapping man, the kind of guy who gets cast as a cerebral hit man in “In Bruges” or the hulking, intimidating “Mad Eye” Moody in the “Harry Potter” films. He is, in short, a guy who doesn’t frighten easily.
But preparing to play Winston Churchill in “Into the Storm,” an HBO movie premiering at 9 p. m. Sunday, gave him a lot to worry about.
“I think the familiarity people have with Churchill’s voice, really, was the huge terror, and I genuinely was having sleepless nights about that until I hooked up with Joan Washington, an extraordinary voice and dialect coach,” Gleeson said.
“I approached it with terror and misgiving and dread, but by the end of the second week her magic had worked, and I was beginning to look forward to the project. She allowed me to speak in something of my own pitch, and it became possible for the voice to become part of my DNA as opposed to just an imitation. I think that gave me the first glimmer of light that I saw.”
Cast as Churchill’s wife, Clementine, Tony Award winner Janet McTeer enjoyed the best of both worlds, however, with a role that gave her rich insights into her character without shoe-horning her into the kind of enforced mimicry with which Gleeson had to cope.
“What you can do is try to find the essence of somebody and then you can match that with yourself and meet somewhere in the middle, whereas with Churchill, you absolutely have to sound like him and look like him,” the actress said.
“When we were doing research for Clemmie, I felt, ‘I don’t really look like her, apart from the fact that she is quite tall,’ so I looked at the kinds of clothes she wore and why she wore them, her elegance and grace in how she moved. Her voice was much, much higher than mine, so I decided to keep my own voice.
“I felt she was quite a reserved woman who was always watching everybody and quite repressed in many ways, except those times when she would explode and say what she really felt. She could seem aloof, but they say that everyone who knew her absolutely adored her, and she could throw back her head and roar with laughter.”
Continuing the story that began in the HBO’s Emmy-winning 2002 movie “The Gathering Storm,” “Into the Storm” finds Churchill reflecting on his leadership during the war years as he, Clemmie and their daughter spend a tense vacation in France waiting to hear whether British voters have elected Churchill to a postwar term as prime minister. That earlier film starred heavyweights Albert Finney and Oscar winner Vanessa Redgrave as the Churchills, but both Gleeson and director Thaddeus O’Sullivan say they didn’t feel undue pressure to imitate the earlier film in any important sense.
“Seeing ‘The Gathering Storm’ finally was rather reassuring, because it showed me that the quality of the production team was fantastic and that it would be possible for us to do some really good work, but it was also rather intimidating in a way because I worried about how we could achieve that same standard,” Gleeson said.
Of course — spoiler alert! — history already reveals that Churchill did not, in fact, get elected as prime minister, a turn of events McTeer thinks Clemmie Churchill saw coming after an unfortunate speech in which Churchill denounced British left-wingers as “Gestapo,” a politically loaded word in the days immediately following the war against Hitler.
“Clemmie was always more left-wing than Winston, and she thought it was a huge insult to all the socialists to compare them to the Nazis after all they had been through, and a stupid mistake on every level,” McTeer said. “She writes about that in a letter to her daughter somewhere. Winston definitely was an arrogant person, but he also was exhausted by the war, and even brilliant people can make mistakes when they’re exhausted. I believe if he had thought about it at a different time, he wouldn’t have done it. Instead, he was bullheaded and was thinking, ‘I know best.’ ”
That arrogance may have played a part in the Brits voting as they did, but there were other factors as well.
“Churchill represented the status quo to them,” Gleeson said. “He was quite revolutionary in his thinking at various stages in his life, but fundamentally he was somebody who held a vision of England that was very hierarchal.
“Churchill’s greatest gift to the nation [during the war years] was that he allowed people to find greatness within themselves, and they were unwilling to go back to their small, subservient little lives,” Gleeson continued. “They wanted more independence, more individuality. They still revered and loved Churchill, but they didn’t go with where he was trying to lead them in peacetime, which I thought was fantastic wisdom [on their part]. Many wartime leaders are rather dangerous in peacetime.”
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