Sophia Michaels
“If you don’t recognize the accent, I’m Irish,” said actor Brendan Gleeson as he began his first-ever Saturday Night Live appearance as host. “And if you don’t recognize the face, I’m that fellow that you’ve seen in that thing that you’ve seen that you can’t remember but you think you kinda liked.”
With slicked back hair and an air of nonchalance, Gleeson’s was the rare monologue that could’ve gone on a segment longer. “You’ve probably seen me in Braveheart,” he continued. “You’ve possibly seen me in Harry Potter,” he said to a thrum of applause. “You definitely have not seen me in Joel Cohn’s black-and-white Macbeth.”
Gleeson cut short his own rambling (“I’m not really used to telling jokes”) and asked for a mandolin to serenade Studio 8-H with the first song he ever learned — a tune by tenor banjo musician Barney McKenna of the Irish folk band, the Dubliners. Gleeson punctuated his plucking by talking about the range of musicality of his family.
“Speaking of weird and wonderful,” Gleeson said, he brought out surprise guest Colin Farrell, who was wearing a cartoonishly large mustache. Farrell needled Gleeson for compliments about working with him — the pair previously worked together on In Bruges. And then the two co-stars sang together, kicking off the show on a rousing high note.
Gleeson and Farrell reunited for Martin McDonagh’s buzzy new film The Banshees of Inisherin — Farrell already won a Best Actor award for it at the Venice International Film Festival. The film arrives in theaters October 21.
