When I tell my best friend I'm going to get to interview Brendan Gleeson, an actor actually worthy of the title living legend, I'm appalled when they text me back "I had to Google who that is." Brendan Gleeson is Brendan Gleeson, I think. How dare you. The fact is that most people, whether they know it or not, are already Brendan Gleeson fans! It might just take them a moment to put a face to the name. Gleeson's played his part in the massive Harry Potter franchise as "Mad-Eye" Moody; he's a frequent collaborator with acclaimed Irish filmmakers Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) and his brother, John Michael McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary). Gleeson even had a delightful cameo in the equally-delightful Paddington 2. So, yeah, no need to Google: You're a Gleeson fan.

Today it's early August, and Gleeson is perched high in a glass-walled hotel suite facing out onto a gorgeous Manhattan panorama. The 64-year-old Dubliner is here just for the day doing press for Season 3 of Mr. Mercedes, a criminally underrated dark thriller from David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies) and based on the popular, more-grounded-than-usual Stephen King book series, which does still include a fairly prominent mind-control plot come Season 2. (As talented as he is, King could evidently only help himself for so long before he introduced the supernatural into his otherwise grounded detective series.) The show can be seen on AT&T Audience Network on Tuesdays at 10pm E.T.

Throughout a freewheeling, charmingly disjointed conversation (Gleeson picks topics out the air as they come to him, and returns to thoughts 20 minutes later when the subject has been dropped) GQ explored the acclaimed actor's storied career, while also finding the space to delve into discussions about how streaming is changing television, the joys of swimming, and our respective bedtimes.

GQ: I'll admit, even as a Mr. Mercedes fan, I had trouble finding the show at first, and I subscribe to DirecTV. I suppose they prepared you for the fact this might not be the kind of show where they're looking too hard at overnight viewers or all that?

Brendan Gleeson: Yeah. I was told the audience will be starting from a small base. The work is what's important, really, to me. But what was odd was that the first season was sold to RTE at home in Ireland, which is a big national channel. So it was the very opposite of what I expected. You know, I thought nobody would hear about in Ireland and that there'd be a certain kind of a profile in America. Whereas people in Ireland actually saw it and gave me a lot of good feedback, and then I come over here and the rest of the cast were saying no one told us anything!

There are platforms and services cropping up now to the point that it overwhelms. But I suppose an upside is there's a creative freedom for shows to go their own way and either succeed or fail on their own terms, rather than having it be up to whoever in Ohio's got a Nielsen box anymore.

And you can't ask for any more than that. There's the opportunity to get some great work done now, a little bit like the seventies in movies when people were giving their head a little bit because it needed to reinvent itself, and TV's reinventing itself. I don't even know if you could call it TV anymore. I didn't work in television for a long time. I love the format of the movies. I love the care that's taken with the movies.