Domhnall Gleeson, The Kitchen, and the power of solid American accent

Domhnall Gleeson, sweet and gentle Irishman extraordinaire, brings the heat with a performance in The Kitchen that seriously plays against type.

We’re all familiar with Domhnall Gleeson, right? Red hair, bit gangly, the son of famously Irish Brendan Gleeson?

He’s almost always cast in the role of the prim, achingly polite upper-middle-class Brit or Irishman, depending on which accent he’s using. He comes across as mild-mannered, the kind of guy that parents love and who feels continually compelled to apologize for his mere existence.

Even in films where he’s unambiguously the bad guy, like Hux in Star Wars, he has less of a Darth Vader vibe and feels more like a grown-up version of that kid in class who always wanted to be the hall monitor and reminded the teacher when she forgot to assign homework. Whatever he is, it’s certainly not cool or, heaven forfend, threatening. That’s just not the Domhnall we all know and love. He’s endearing as a gentle, adorably ruffled, well-intentioned worrywart who is constantly being wrong-footed by life. That’s his brand.

However that is definitely not the Domhnall Gleeson who co-stars as Gabriel in The Kitchen, the new female-led mobster film that sees Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, and Elisabeth Moss take over the Irish mob in 1970s Hells Kitchen after their husbands are sent to prison.

Gabriel is a hitman, a Vietnam vet with some lingering emotional issues. He’s the kind of guy who can calmly and charmingly walk a girl through dismembering a corpse in her bathtub. And not to glorify violence or anything, but this is the hottest Gleeson’s ever been. From the moment he bursts into an alley to rescue Moss’s embattled Claire, he has a dominant presence that consistently commands attention. There’s a sexual energy and chemistry between him and Moss that makes their storyline one of the most compelling in the entire film. We stan, OK? But how did he manage such a leap, immediately and fully overriding audience perceptions of him?

Simple: it’s the accent. This is not to say that American accents are inherently sexier (far from it, actually). Rather, the thick New York accent gives him a blank slate to work with by removing the element of his performance that most closely ties him to the kind gentleman in a period piece that we often see him as.

Because really, the accent is the only thing that’s significantly different about him. He didn’t bulk up for the role of Gabriel, and isn’t hiding a bunch of tattoos — the American accent is doing all the heavy lifting in building his intense, “tough guy” image. It gives him the freedom to break free of typecasting and explore new creative avenues that might otherwise be closed to him.

Gleeson is hardly the first posh-sounding actor to find a new identity in an American accent. Dan Stevens first became famous due to his roles in Sense and Sensibility and Downton Abbey, the sort of BBC period productions that can be a slippery slope for actors — you do one, then another, and before you know it you’ve spent 20 years in Regency-era costumes. But then he did The Guest, complete with rugged American accent, which paved the way for edgier fare in Legion, The Apostle, and Her Smell — roles that are all about as far away from Matthew Crawley as you can get.

Benedict Cumberbatch, who is arguably one of the most talented English actors to have a genuinely mediocre American accent, parlayed his journey across the pond into a not unsubstantial role in the Marvel universe, something that would have been inconceivable back when he was making a dreamy, atmospheric adaptation of Parade’s End.

In the end, the moral of the story is that if you’re an actor from the British Isles with a plummy accent feeling stifled by the affable Englishman typecasting, the solution is simple: perfect a working-class New York accent and show them that you can play a tough guy with the best of them.

Just don’t forget your roots: the world still needs lavishly costumed period pieces and charming English romcoms directed by Richard Curtis, after all.