American star on the challenge of speaking Irish in grippingly tense new thriller movie

Stephen Porzio

The actor recalls joking to his director: ‘Are you sure you don’t want to just get someone Irish to do it?’

After over a decade of acclaimed lead turns in indie films and supporting work in bigger movies, rising star Christopher Abbott is the man of the moment.

Already in 2025, the American actor has headlined two huge new releases. Last month, he played the title role in the reboot of The Wolf Man and this month, he’s the star of the grippingly tense Irish thriller Bring Them Down.

In the latter, Abbott plays Michael, a quiet and intense rural farmer with a dark history who becomes embroiled in an escalating, dangerous feud with another local farming family (represented by Barry Keoghan and Paul Ready).

JOE spoke with the American star ahead of the release of Bring Them Down and the first question we had for him was how he ended up playing a country farmer in an Ireland-set movie.

“Yeah, I’m surprised too,” he joked, before adding: “[Writer-director] Christopher Andrews, he came to me with the project and yeah, I mean one of the first things I said, I was like: ‘Are you sure you don’t want to just get someone Irish to do it?'”

Despite asking this question, the role of Michael proved very enticing to Abbott.

He added: “Aside from the challenge of doing the language and the accent, which I would call a fun challenge to do, being able to then just step into that world, it’s very unique and specific.

“I sort of grabbed onto it just because it’s not something you would get asked often to do – get into this sheep farming family, small-town world. It’s one of the joys about doing this job – you can kind of just experience or get at least a little taste or glimpse of what that’s like.”

He was also full of praise for first-time director Andrews and the cast the filmmaker had assembled for the project.

“The script was great and Chris Andrews, I really love him and I was looking forward to working with him.

“It’s his first feature so that was a new experience for him as well but I just believed in him. I trusted him and then him casting Barry [Keoghan] and Colm [Meaney] and Nora-Jane [Noone] and Paul [Ready] and everyone in it, it just felt like it all matched really well.”

The actor also said that even though he and Keoghan play enemies in the film, the pair are actually “mates” in real life and had a great time filming in “beautiful” Wicklow.

Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott in Bring Them Down

That said, Abbott noted that, before cameras rolled, he was very concerned about making sure both his Irish accent and the many scenes in which he converses in Irish felt authentic – something which he accomplished with aplomb.

Laughing, the actor told JOE: “Of course, it’s a concern because I don’t want to sound bad. The point is to try to do a good job… I would have had a hard time watching it if I sounded terrible.”

As for learning lines as Gaeilge, Abbott confirmed it was incredibly difficult, stating:

“I mean the way the Irish language is written is hard to follow. The roots of it are obviously not Latin, not Germanic or whatever. So, it’s hard to just read the words.

“I had to learn everything sort of phonetically.

“I couldn’t have a conversation in it now, this time past, but I remember some of my lines and I remember what they mean.

“But that’s all that’s important really, to at least just know what I’m talking about and know what I’m saying in the context of this movie.”

He jokingly adds: “To learn the entire language I think would have taken way too long and no one had the money for that.”

Abbott’s career shows no signs of slowing down.

He will appear next in Ann Lee, Oscar-nominees Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s follow-up to this year’s critical and commercial hit The Brutalist, as well as East of Eden, Netflix’s new take on John Steinbeck’s classic novel of the same name opposite Florence Pugh and our own Ciarán Hinds.

And despite headlining Wolf Man and Bring Them Down back-to-back and having these other high-profile upcoming roles, Abbott has a grounded outlook on his recent successes.

“Look, I’ve done a lot of indie movies I’m proud of and no one sees them. So, of course, it’s nice [when] people do,” he explained.

“But at this point in my life, I’ve accepted when people do and when people don’t. So, good or bad outcomes or whatever, I think things come and go.

“I’m talking to you from New Zealand [where he’s halfway through filming East of Eden] and I’m working on this thing now anyway so I’m so geographically far from everything that’s happening and I think it’s kind of good. I’m always working on something else when things come out anyway.

“It’s a funny relationship when a movie comes out because you’ve done it, depending on the movie, sometimes like two years [before]. And it’s all in sort of retrospect. So you feel like you’re sort of talking about something from the past.

“It’s an interesting thing but I don’t think about it too much.”