Domhnall Gleeson has got so much new stuff coming up, someone recently joked that this was the “summer of Domhnall”. Now the phrase is all over the internet, and Gleeson is mortified: “The worry is that somebody will say this to me now thinking that I believe it.” He doesn’t know where it came from – possibly his co-star Gayle Rankin on his new movie The Incomer. “It’s certainly not something I’m trying to push … but it would be great if it could be the headline.”
He’s in a good mood when we meet at a London hotel on a hot afternoon. You could say he’s good at interviews – charming, funny, garrulous, the perfect chatshow guest. He could just be acting, admittedly, but he seems to be a genuinely good-natured, grounded sort of guy.
The Incomer, an eccentric Scottish comedy, is one of three new projects Gleeson has coming out in a matter of weeks. The others are the second season of the US Office spin-off The Paper and Werner Herzog’s new film, Bucking Fastard, which is about to play at the Venice film festival. More of all this later, but first we must address Gleeson’s most prominent, and least probable, recent role: as the star of a Taylor Swift music video.
Directed by Swift herself, the video for Opalite is a bizarrely goofy concoction with an equally bizarre origin story. It came about because the two of them appeared together on the Graham Norton show last October. Fellow guest Cillian Murphy joked that The Paper was worth watching for Gleeson’s dancing alone. “I’m hoping to get in a Taylor Swift music video,” he joked in reply.
That was that, he thought. “Then two weeks later, we got an email. Like, wild!” Not just him: Swift asked every other guest on the show to be in the video – Murphy, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, Lewis Capaldi, even Norton himself. “No one else in the world can come up with an idea like that and make it happen,” Gleeson says.
Gleeson has the starring role, as a lonely man who gets an upgrade on his painful relationship with a cactus when he is magically matched with fellow loner Swift. Then they dance together joyfully in matching glittery turquoise tracksuits.
“They told me the day before there was going to be a dance. I was like, are you fucking joking?” Gleeson recalls. Are you good at that kind of thing, I ask. “No. I’m terrible at it!” He spent all night practising in front of the mirror. But Swift’s direction did the rest: “She said ‘full send’, though I didn’t know what that phrase meant. She was like, ‘The moves don’t matter. You just gotta go for and love it, and just trust in it and experience it.’” The first take after she said that was the one they used. “The believing in it and the joy of it helps you do it.”
So did he go to her wedding?
“Er …” He ums and ahs. “Can I plead the fifth?”
Sociable as he is, Gleeson is also very good at protecting his privacy. He’d rather not answer questions about his immediate family (he has been married to the producer Juliette Bonass since 2023), and he’s not on social media at all, he says. “I think that’s just like a line in the sand that helps immediately in terms of the personal not being public.”
In short, Gleeson does a fine job of staying under the radar while also being everywhere. He is not exactly an inconspicuous figure, with his bright red hair and striking features – his Italian co-worker in The Paper says to him: “Look at your eyes: scary, like goat” – but on screen Gleeson is remarkably adaptable. He doesn’t really have a type. He’s played romantic leads (Richard Curtis’s About Time, for example), evil villains (General Hux in the Star Wars movies, or terrorising Julianne Moore in last year’s Echo Valley), real-life characters (Bob Geldof, AA Milne), comical idiots (Frank of Ireland). Family films, period dramas, westerns, sci-fi – he just seems to fit in wherever you put him. Even his age is strangely malleable: he’s now 43 but looks barely any older than he did playing Bill Weasley in the Harry Potter films.
What’s more, he’s so good at accents, I’d almost forgotten that he’s Irish. When I first met Gleeson a decade ago, it was on the set of Frank, the indie satire based on the outsider musician Frank Sidebottom. We were in a freezing cabin in rural Ireland but Gleeson was playing a middle-class English guy, and stayed flawlessly in accent throughout (but not in character). That’s the best way, he’s learned from experience: “One day when I was doing Harry Potter I kind of went Australian by accident and couldn’t retrieve it.” It has its disadvantages, though: “You don’t want to do any phone calls with anyone from home during your work day.”
In The Incomer he’s passing as Scottish, which is more challenging: “Going to Scotland and doing a Scottish accent in front of an all-Scottish crew is a very different experience.” It was kind of fitting, though: Gleeson plays the unwelcome visitor of the title: a mainland bureaucrat who comes to a remote Scottish isle to evict its only residents, a pair of insular siblings (Rankin and Grant O’Rourke). Written and directed by Louis Paxton, and filmed right at the northern tip of Scotland, the film is a charming mix of surreal comedy, local folklore, rugged landscapes and tender companionship, plus a great deal of seagull action – catching them, eating them, being attacked by them, even pretending to be them.
At heart it’s a film about isolation and acceptance, he says. His character is as lonely as the siblings: an awkward, underconfident middle-manager type. He cuts a pretty pathetic figure visually, too: geeky dress sense, feebly unassertive, his hair a mess. “I got a perm for that,” he says. “No one talks about the dedication of an actor any more. I lived with a perm for four or five months after I did that film!” But he wanted to have a “comedic silhouette”, he says. “So the perm made just my head bigger, like a big lollipop sort of thing.”
He’s a slightly more dashing middle-manager type in The Paper: the almost naively idealistic editor of a once great Ohio newspaper. The show is a gentle mockumentary sitcom in the mould of co-creator Greg Daniels’ other hits, Parks and Recreation and The Office, but it touches on a serious issue: the decline of local news (the paper in question is an afterthought to the company’s primary business – manufacturing toilet paper). It’s not overtly political, but “making something that is pro-journalism speaks for itself in terms of protecting it and caring about it”, says Gleeson, who considers himself “very much on the left”.
As always, Gleeson did his homework. Months before starting, he went and hung out with real journalists on some of Ohio’s surviving daily newspapers, shadowing them, attending editorial meetings, asking questions. It was eye-opening but also depressing. “By the time we were doing press for the first season, this person who I had shadowed a little bit, who was a very well-established journalist, was out of the job,” he says. She’d moved on because she could no longer make a living.
“It’s harder than it should be to do good journalism. People don’t want to pay for it, and people who it’s against don’t want it to exist. So you can’t pretend that’s not happening, but the young people I met who were going into it, as well as those who were staying the course and fighting the good fight, I found overwhelmingly inspiring. So it gives me hope, even though maybe not optimism.”
It’s a rare thing to interview an actor who actually sympathises with your profession, given how intrusive some of us can be: stalking their socials, ambushing their leisure time or even just asking questions about their lives, like I am now. But he knows the drill. “I’m trying to keep my personal life personal, just to talk about the work.”
Having a famous dad may have coloured Gleeson’s stance towards celebrity – even if he was essentially a grownup before Brendan became well known outside Ireland in the late 90s. “He is much more intensely famous,” says Gleeson of his father. Back home, Brendan can no longer walk down the street without being stopped. Domhnall gets a little of that, he says, “but not to the same extent”. He goes into Dublin all the time and it’s usually fine. “I’m quite unusual or individual-looking, but I’m also quite different-looking in lots of things, so sometimes people don’t put them all together, which is great.” The perm drew some attention, though, he admits.
His parents never encouraged or discouraged him, or his three younger brothers, from following in his father’s footsteps. “The only thing: they asked me not to be a standup comedian. Probably just because I wasn’t funny.” He’s not being entirely truthful here. His intention was to write and direct, but one day he agreed to accept an award on his father’s behalf. He was still at school at the time (a state secondary school just outside Dublin). “I was 16 and really shy, but weirdly it was like, ‘I could do that if he needs me to.’” This was going out live on Irish national television. “Right before I went up, they said, ‘You’ve got 30 seconds for your acceptance speech,’ and I had this three-page speech that my dad had written. I was like, ‘I’m not gonna be able to say that in 30 seconds,’ so I went up and sort of vamped, and made fun of it.”
It turned out he was funny. “I quite liked the buzz of hearing people laugh,” he admits. His father’s agent, Teri Hayden, was watching, and called him in for a meeting.
Three years later, in his first year at the Dublin Institute of Technology, he was cast in Martin McDonagh’s IRA black comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore. That’s when he got hooked on acting: “I didn’t have a thing of, ‘I don’t want to be an actor because of my dad.’ It was just by doing it I went, ‘I do want to be an actor.’ And the play was in London, so there was a bit of distance from my dad. It wasn’t like doing it in Dublin and feeling him looking over my shoulder the whole time.” Four years later the play transferred to Broadway, where Gleeson received a Tony nomination. His career was up and running.
He has worked with his father and his brother Brian, who is also an actor, many times since: in McDonagh’s short film Six Shooter, which won an Oscar in 2006; in the Harry Potter movies (Brendan played Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody); he and Brian fought to the death in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! and were best buddies in the 2021 sitcom Frank of Ireland. And all three of them performed on stage together in 2006 in Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce.
It’s not necessarily a jolly love-in when they work together. “It can be difficult at times, and I’m sure we all drive each other mad, but that happens with everybody you work with.” But then it’s not meant to be fun, he believes. “There’s no point being there to be nice to each other. The point is to change the other person’s performance with your own, the point is to bounce off each other and create sparks.” Not in a negative way, though. “I don’t believe in having a bad time at work. That’s all bullshit: to make good art, you have to have a bad time – fuck all that.”
He’s now worked with some of the biggest names in the business – the Coen brothers, Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Julianne Moore, Margot Robbie, Taylor Swift – but Gleeson still gets awed by people, he says. “When I met the Coen brothers I found it hard. I bumped into Paul Thomas Anderson at something once and I found that very difficult to keep my shit together.” That was almost the case with Werner Herzog, but luckily, their first meeting was over Zoom, “which is so depersonalising and demythologising, just because it’s all, ‘Sorry, can you hear me?’ There’s nothing fancy about it. After that I felt prepared to meet him.”
Gleeson only worked a few days on Bucking Fastard, but it was a memorable experience. Kate and Rooney Mara play twins who do everything together – speaking, living, dressing. They even fall for the same man. Gleeson plays their social worker. Unbelievably, it’s based on a true story. Herzog met the real-life twins, Freda and Greta Chaplin (the title is a spoonerism they both made, in unison, in court). “I think maybe he was interested in making a documentary about them,” says Gleeson. He began to suspect that although his character is Irish, he was based on Herzog himself. “He told me a couple of stories about meeting them and what it was like to be around them, then I realised my character in the film has some similar experiences. One of the scenes is basically something that happened to him, with them.”
Herzog, of course, has one of the most famous and highly imitable accents in cinema. Was Gleeson tempted to try it? “When I realised that my character has aspects of him in it, for a second in your mind you’re like, ‘Should I do it?’ Then you’re like, ‘No. Absolutely not. No, no, no.’”
What’s next for Gleeson? He doesn’t really know, he says, though he hopes The Paper will get another season. He’s always got stuff in the pipeline, he’s always in demand for all sorts of roles, genres, accents. Not having a “type” has proved to be a professional asset, and it keeps life interesting. “It’s where I’m happiest,” he says, “because you don’t know what the next job is going to be, you don’t know what the next challenge is going to be.”
Before he goes, he apologises again for not answering some of the more personal questions I’d asked him, which really isn’t necessary at all. Maybe it’s the other side of the coin of his versatility. We don’t have to know everything about people just because we see them on screen – and often it helps that we don’t.
Season two of The Paper launches on Sky and NOW in the UK on 10 September. The Incomer is in cinemas in the UK from 4 September.
