Well, he has the locals fooled.

When Brendan Gleeson took on the role of Murray in the Newfoundland-set comedy The Grand Seduction (opening Friday [May 30]), his biggest obstacle, he tells the Straight, was getting that accent right. “It was the one thing that freaked me out,” says the Irish acting great from his St. John’s hotel. “I kinda kept saying, ‘Oh no, I’m going to be taking everybody out of the film as soon as I open my mouth.’ ”

The whimsical comedy—about a depressed Maritime town called Tickle Head that mounts an elaborate operation to lure a big-city doctor into residency—has been getting raves as it’s travelled around the country on the festival circuit. And Gleeson has been singled out for his convincing transformation into a Newfie.

But, notes the thesp, “I’m still kind of slightly disbelieving because people are very nice over here. But I know from the Irish situation that they do not like to see their language mangled. I know some of the awful Irish accents that can emanate from film is a real turnoff at home, and I didn’t want to commit the same sin over here. If I can close the circuit tonight, I can put it to bed. Tonight’s the big one in St. John’s. If we get validated here, well, I’ll be happy then.”

As Gleeson’s costar Liane Balaban reports, in a separate interview from Toronto a few days later: “I wasn’t there but by all accounts it was a success, and apparently [actor] Mark Critch’s cab driver asked him what part of Newfoundland Brendan Gleeson was from. So there you go.”

There you go, indeed. Like Gleeson’s, Balaban’s commitment to honouring the region’s culture “goes without saying”. For both actors, it was director Don McKellar who imagined the right tone for a project that could have gone, in Gleeson’s words, “all twee and paddy-whackery”.

“His work always plays to the top of the audience’s intelligence, which is so important in a film like this where it could easily become kinda broad, and dumb,” Balaban says. Gleeson actually intended to decline the work when he met with McKellar in Montreal, at least until he understood that the filmmaker was determined to avoid a “quirky-in-inverted-commas comedy”.

“It’s just one of those things, because I’ve seen it done in those ways at home,” Gleeson says. “And it’s so patronizing, and it’s so nasty, whereas when you actually can enjoy the culture and laugh about how mad it is while loving it and respecting it—it’s a completely different vibe, you know? So the fact that Don was gonna do that and we could do that together, well, it was critical, really.”

If the film’s ultimate success can be attributed to anything else besides the hard graft that went into performances, tone, and the glorious location photography of Douglas Koch, it’s that mysterious factor that both actors happen to bring up during their talks with the Straight. Balaban calls it the “unknown element”. Gleeson, meanwhile, prefers to pay simple but elegant tribute to it, whatever it is. “It’s just exciting when it works, you know?”