Actor Brendan Gleeson has said he learnt a lot about the non-binary community while making State of The Union, his new drama about a sixty-something couple undergoing marriage counselling.
The second season of the Emmy-award winning short series by Nick Hornby explores contemporary relationships in ten-minute episodes and is currently showing on the RTÉ Player.
Gleeson stars as 62-year-old Scott, "a good-natured curmudgeon" who is locked in negotiations with his estranged wife Ellen (Patricia Clarkson) and the show also stars Esco Jouley as non-binary barista Jay, who expands Scott's rather conservative worldview.
Speaking on the Ray D'Arcy Show on RTÉ Radio One, Gleeson said, "From a personal point of view, this was the first real proper interaction with a non-binary person that I had in my working life. It was a real eye-opener for me.
"And just working with Esco I learned a huge amount. Most of which had to do with the fluidity of this whole area in terms of, if you’re looking for definites, you’re not going to get them.
"There’s a line in the series where Jay accuses Scott that he wasn’t going to tell him something because 'people like you’ and he says what are people like me and Jay says, ‘people who are driven crazy by ambiguity’."
Gleeson added that he found Jouley’s tolerance of him "incredibly liberating".
"There was one particular person and ‘they’ is the pronoun you have to use, and I consistently got it wrong and Esco would say I’m fascinated that’s the way you see me, I’d called Esco a he because I thought he was he first," Gleeson said.
"And there was no outrage and Esco understood I was making an effort to come round and take my 66-year-old head and muscle memory and kind of work around the idea that you just call somebody they."
"So, I found that tolerance by Esco, of me, incredibly liberating and we had a great time. The whole thing was an eye opener for me.
He added, "I don’t do social media so I’m not aware of the rows that have been going on. I am new to the issue and there’s huge issues arising generationally. The generation gap is opening really widely again in a way that is quite distressing and it’s not the only gap."
Season one of State of The Union starred Chris O'Dowd and Rosamund Pike as a younger couple in counselling and season two was shot over three weeks last year.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
"We did it in the middle of Covid over in London and it’s a new format of little ten-minute sound-bitey pieces set in a hipster coffee shop before they go upstairs for marriage counselling," Gleeson said.
"Chris O’Dowd and Rosamund Pike did it last year and Nick Hornby wrote it and Stephen Frears directed so it’s a very high-class set-up and it won a bucket load of Emmys."
Speaking about his co-star Patricia Clarkson, he said, "The craic I had with Patricia, she is a brilliant actress, she's just brilliant."
The actor also spoke about his famous Late Late Show appearance several years ago when he spoke passionately about how his mother was treated by the Irish health service.
"My mother asked me `what are you doing’ and then she said after people reacted to it she said, `I don’t know’. She was very reluctant about it. People of that generation didn’t put it out there. I just felt it was nothing specific. It was somrhting systemic that wasn’t reflecting well on who we are."
He added that his broadside on the health service wasn’t planned. "I have a fundamental suspicion of actors who think they are an expert on everything. I was uneasy about doing it from a privacy point of view and I’d say my mother was mortified but she did get a lot of feedback. It was waiting to be said."
State of The Union is on the RTÉ Player
