‘MobLand’ returns as power, violence and dysfunction collide

When Pierce Brosnan first prepared to play Conrad Harrigan, he arrived with an accent and a plan. Guy Ritchie swiftly disposed of both.

“He said, ‘No. Be Irish. Go more Irish. Go mad’,” Brosnan recalled at the global press conference for the second season of Paramount+’s MobLand. The character, he says, came together in about 15 minutes before they shot his first scene.

It was good advice. MobLand is Guy Ritchie territory at its most enjoyable: violent, stylish, funny and populated by people you might cross several roads to avoid in real life. Tom Hardy plays Harry Da Souza, the fixer attempting to hold together the Harrigan criminal empire, with Paddy Considine, Toby Jones, Joanne Froggatt and Janet McTeer among a formidable supporting cast. Season 2 adds Johnny Flynn and Ophelia Lovibond to the mix.

But the great pleasure is Brosnan and Helen Mirren as Conrad and Maeve Harrigan, the husband-and-wife heads of a crime family whose domestic arrangements are almost as dysfunctional as their business model.

There’s murder and mayhem, certainly, but also gangsters attending couples counselling, arguments about clothes left on the floor and confusion over whether Conrad is the father or grandfather of a particular child. And Harry may be employed to clean up bodies, but at home he can still be reprimanded for failing to put something in the laundry basket.

Brosnan is particularly good. In person, he’s an utter gentleman, with an unexpectedly strong Irish lilt and a lyrical way of speaking. Watching him transform into the ageing, impulsive Conrad — frequently goaded by Maeve towards acts of spectacularly poor judgement — is part of the fun.

I’d pay a lot of money to work with Pierce Brosnan for the rest of my life. — Helen Mirren

Mirren has “gone Irish” too. “It gives the show a lyricism, and a rhythm,” she says.

The two veterans are clearly enjoying themselves enormously. “We come to work, open the suitcase and we put the character on,” Brosnan says. “And off to the races we go.”

Asked to analyse his acting method more deeply, he practically squirms. Mirren has a more vivid way of explaining the Harrigans. Conrad, she says, is “a volcano”, while Maeve is “a snaky river”, winding her way in and out of everybody’s lives. “I guess she’s the ultimate manipulator really,” she says. Yet Mirren doesn’t regard Maeve as a cold strategist. Her emotions — jealousy, fear, hatred, desire, love — sit close to the surface. She feels them and acts accordingly, which can be unfortunate for anybody standing nearby.

Season 2 pushes the series further into the Gothic and Jacobean territory Mirren clearly relishes. The Harrigans are fighting to hold together their increasingly fractured empire as rivals circle and loyalties inside the family begin to splinter. The 10-episode season premiered on September 18, and Paramount+ has already ordered a third.

What prevents all this dynastic bloodletting from becoming ridiculous, Mirren argues, is the contrast between the Harrigans’ professional and domestic lives.

“They can go out and commit murder and mayhem, but when they’re at home, they’re like an old married couple.” She immediately launches into one of those arguments: “Put your bloody socks away!”

Brosnan agrees. The bedroom and bathroom scenes are, he says, “almost their own little play within this madcap world” — two parents trying to run an empire of violence while arguing about laundry and who feeds the dogs. It’s precisely this personal lens that gives MobLand its humour.

Mortality comes for Conrad

The jokes disguise a darker trajectory. Season 2 finds Conrad increasingly fractured as a medical condition begins affecting his mind. Brosnan describes him as a man confronting the fact that the end is no longer theoretical.

“Mortality is circling the wagons,” he says. Conrad is “like a trapped spider in a bottle, trying to find his way out”. Whichever direction he turns, there seems to be no exit.

Maeve, meanwhile, is discovering the dangerous arithmetic of power. “The higher you aim, the further there is to fall,” Mirren says, invoking Icarus.

Asked whether Maeve is ultimately the person holding the Harrigan family together, Mirren laughs. Family harmony is hardly her priority. What matters is the continuation of the dynasty and its criminal success. “She’ll sacrifice anyone to that.”

Mirren is particularly pleased that the women of MobLand are not decorative additions to a gangster story. None, she says, is merely a cipher, and the younger women are increasingly becoming threats to Maeve’s authority.

Guy Ritchie role plays

The new season begins at a dog-racing track, with the sort of gunfight that immediately establishes we’re not watching All Creatures Great and Small. It was also among Brosnan and Mirren’s first days filming together.

Mirren remembers Ritchie directing the sequence “with such élan and fun”. Brosnan recalls the director pulling the two stars aside in front of the crew and demonstrating exactly what he wanted — playing both Conrad and Maeve himself, shooting imaginary adversaries with his fingers while supplying his own gunfire sound effects.

As for handling actual prop guns, neither actor claims great expertise. “They’re wonderful and awful at the same time,” Mirren says. “I just pretend to know what I’m doing,” Brosnan adds.

Breaking the Brosnan mould

Conrad also gives Brosnan the opportunity to dismantle the polished image that’s followed him for decades. He famously modelled aspects of his breakthrough character in Remington Steele on Cary Grant, before becoming James Bond and cementing himself as one of cinema’s most reliably suave men.

Conrad Harrigan isn’t suave. “It’s liberating,” Brosnan says. “It’s wonderful to crack the mould of what you’ve created over so many years.”

Mirren calls the role “a cherry on the cake”, suggesting the producers must have sensed that somewhere beneath all that elegance, “that volcano was there inside Brosnan”.

This is the third time Mirren and Brosnan have worked together in three years, and their affection is obvious. “I’d pay a lot of money to work with Pierce Brosnan for the rest of my life,” Mirren says.

They don’t particularly socialise away from set. Instead, they share an old-fashioned working rhythm: arrive, prepare, stay quiet and get on with it. Both came through theatre, and Mirren loves the long scenes written for MobLand, which allow them to experience something close to stage acting without, as she points out, having to perform eight shows a week.

Brosnan reduces the philosophy further, quoting advice once given to him by director Bruce Beresford: “Show up, say the lines, don’t bump into the furniture, get off the stage.” Simple enough, although Conrad might add one further instruction, “Do whatever Maeve tells you”.

“She’s my oxygen,” Brosnan says of his fictional wife. “Without her, I’d be rudderless.” Considering Maeve is quite capable of steering him directly towards murder, that could be the problem.

• MobLand Season 1 is on Netflix while Season 2 is available on DStv in South Africa.