He started in the Harry Potter films and has since become ubiquitous, playing every type of character: romcom leads, evil villains, comical idiots. He even starred in a Taylor Swift video. So how does he stay so under the radar?
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.”
“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”.
