Irish actor Brendan Gleeson has boarded Jonathan Teplitzky’s crime caper Mr. Cranky, according to Screen Daily.
Assuming the title role of Kevin Darcy, a temperamental crime-boss-cum-debt-collector, Gleeson’s addition is the first piece of casting to come out of the nascent project, which recently earned the backing of Metro International. Teplitzky (The Railway Man) will be working from Chris Nyst’s script, with the director eyeing a September shoot Down Under – Melbourne, to be specific.
Having arguably stole the show across both In Bruges and The Guard, Brendan Gleeson is perhaps the perfect fit to play a cantankerous mob boss, and he’ll be causing nine kinds of headaches in Mr. Cranky by threatening those people who can’t pay their debits. A standard mob boss, then; though things take a turn for the worse when Darcy’s rampant temper gets the best of him, sparks a gang war, and ultimately leads to his ex-girlfriend being killed in a car bomb.
From there, Gleeson’s volatile lead is tasked with taking care of Angela, his seven-year-old daughter, who tries to curb her father’s anger issues and, by effect, prove that Mr. Cranky isn’t all he’s cracked up to be. But even making tracks to a safe haven on Australia’s Gold Coast isn’t enough to ward off the life of crime he left behind, with Lebanese hitmen and a gang of drug dealers hot on his trail.
Currently, Mr. Cranky is tentatively set to lens in September, with an eventual release in early 2017. Brendan Gleeson, meanwhile, can next be seen opposite Emma Thompson in Alone in Berlin. It’ll be showcased during Berlin Film Festival later this week.
