If you’re a professional actor, you’ve probably had a few bad auditions in your life — and whether or not you book the part, a bad audition is flat-out embarrassing. For example, Domhnall Gleeson, who’s currently starring in the Peacock original series “The Paper,” is apparently still haunted by his audition for the “Harry Potter” film franchise, in which he briefly plays Bill Weasley.
During an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” (via Entertainment Weekly), Gleeson — who is Irish and also happens to be the son of Brendan Gleeson, a celebrated Irish actor who also showed up in the “Harry Potter” movies as Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody — said he went in to audition for Bill prepared to do a traditional British accent, but went in a … weirdly Southern direction. “My first day on that set, I was meant to be doing an English accent,” Gleeson told Meyers. “They’d all been doing it — I was in the seventh and eighth movies, only a small part. And … I went Australian. And I couldn’t stop.”
As Gleeson tells it, he picked an Aussie accent, for whatever reason, and ultimately, director David Yates stepped in. “I went Australian on the first take and there was like 300 people on set and the director was there like, ‘Cut!’ And this weird, long pause,” Gleeson continued. “And then the director [Yates] came over and he was like, ‘So, you’ve gone Australian.'” Apparently, Yates was far from the only person who noticed Gleeson’s Australian twang. As Gleeson recalled:
“Everyone knows he’s gone Australian. And I was like [adopts an Australian accent], ‘No, I know.’ And he was like, ‘Is there anything you can do about it?’ ‘Not really mate. I think this is what we’re doing.'”
“It was shocking,” Gleeson concluded. “It was one of the worst days of my life. And then things got a little bit better. And so I hope my American accent [on ‘The Paper’] is better, but you tell me!”
Meyers, of course, riffed on the whole situation, saying that when you’re auditioning for an adaptation of a very famous book, you can’t exactly “have your agent call in and be like, ‘Could it be Australian?'” Gleeson was game. “Well, I was also playing one of the Weasley brothers, so he’s got bright red hair,” Gleeson joked. “If he’s Australian, Mrs. Weasley [played by Julie Walters] has been doing some[thing], you know what I mean? Something’s been up.”
