When Domhnall Gleeson was 14 he saved up for a school trip to Egypt to see the pyramids of Giza. He went with a group of classmates from Malahide Community School, and it’s not that the moment was wasted on him, but he says getting to see the pyramids again with “an adult brain”, for his latest movie role, was a more profound experience.
In that new film, Fountain of Youth, Gleeson plays an Irish billionaire, and it brought the chance to get up close to the ancient monuments. “It was totally different seeing them through adult eyes. We were right in the middle of them. There’s something about the scale that doesn’t make sense in your brain. They are just beyond comprehension. I was so happy I got to go back.”
Directed by Guy Ritchie, Fountain of Youth is a full on-action adventure starring John Krasinski and Natalie Portman as estranged siblings reunited in search of mythical treasure using clues hidden in priceless artworks. A heist movie with high-octane chase scenes involving mopeds, helicopters, sports cars and, in one case, the sunken Lusitania, it’s an Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code caper for the TikTok generation.
Taking the role was an easy decision. Gleeson was mad about the Indiana Jones movies growing up in Malahide, in north Co Dublin, with his three brothers, his mother, Mary, and his actor father, Brendan.
“There were so many reasons to want to be part of it – the fact that it was Guy Ritchie doing his version of it, and then John and Natalie ...” The star power of those two names hangs in the air. “They’re both really, really nice people to be around. The tone they set was wonderful. It was a very fun shoot – as it should be with something like this.”
The film was shot last year, in locations that included Cairo, Bangkok and Vienna. Gleeson is talking today in a video call from a hotel in Paris, where I can see an impressive chandelier hanging above his head. “It’s insanely fancy,” he says.
Owen Carver, Gleeson’s character in Fountain of Youth, is rich enough to have several private jets and, as he tells Portman’s character at one point, “an army of highfalutin lawyers”. Thankfully, that phrase is the film’s only moment of stage Oirishness.
I’m getting itchy now. I feel like I need to get some demons out in some sort of a way
Carver is one of those understated billionaires, more Collison brothers than Elon Musk, a moneyed man in a dapper tweed suit determined to track down the Fountain of Youth because he has terminal liver cancer. “We’re all dying, it’s just a matter of when,” his character says at one point. (The “protectors”, led by Stanley Tucci and the brilliant Eiza González, are a shady group with lots of guns who are determined to prevent the adventurers from finding the fountain.)
Originally, the role was written as an American. “He was a little more brash. Guy wanted to change that. He wanted me to use my own accent and to make him a more personable sort of character, more identifiable,” Gleeson says. “He took it away from the obvious and made it slightly more interesting.”
Last year Gleeson played an Irish character in Alice & Jack, Channel 4’s romantic epic about a 15-year love story. Before that it had been a while since he’d been able to use his own accent on a job. “It’s definitely different,” he says. “Turning up and not having to think about an accent was good, because there was a lot of tearing up the script ... It was good not to have to worry”.
Carver might come across as “one of those nice billionaires, but there’s a transactional aspect to him, necessarily”. And he’s the sort of person for whom any amount of money will never be enough, Gleeson says.
We talk about the enduring preoccupation with anti-ageing hacks and the obsession with staying young or living forever in storytelling from the legend of Tír na nÓg to The Substance, the Demi Moore body-horror film.
The characters in Ritche’s movie are all searching for the fountain for different reasons.
Did Gleeson wonder if he’d be tempted to take a sip from such a spring if it really existed? “I didn’t find myself thinking about that so much. My character has his reasons for being obsessed with it in the film, so I was thinking about it more in those terms ... It’s such a universal theme, and something people lust after and want.”
We return to the difference between him looking at the pyramids aged 14 and then 41. “Since then I’ve experienced a lot of life – but also loss, and that makes you think about things differently.” He says he’s been something of a “slow learner” in this regard. “I didn’t get Beckett until I was embarrassingly older ... but when these things hit, they hit hard.”
Gleeson has had a remarkable career since his Tony-nominated breakout role in Martin McDonagh’s blackly comic play The Lieutenant of Inishmore, in 2006. He has been working steadily ever since, a regular in both the Star Wars and Harry Potter franchises, and honing his craft in more formative roles such as Richard Curtis’s enduringly lovable film About Time and Joe Wright’s epic Anna Karenina.
He had a huge year in 2015, when he was in four Oscar-nominated movies, playing a computer-programming prodigy in Ex Machina, a love interest in Brooklyn, a nasty First Order leader in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and a fur trapper, alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, in The Revenant, which went on to win the Oscar for best movie.
With the Star Wars franchise another level of stardom was thrust upon him. Was that hard to deal with?
“I think any of the difficulties you have with that stuff probably should remain private,” he says. “I’m lucky. People in Ireland are pretty chill for the most part. If people are coming up to you because they liked something you were in, Jesus, I mean, if you’re complaining about that, then, you know, it’s not ideal.” (I am relieved to hear this, as I once went up to Gleeson, drunkenly, in a club in Dublin to gush about how much I loved him in About Time. He appears to have no memory of this encounter, thankfully.)
The “Harry Potter thing” was so “huge and intense when it happened, despite the fact the part I had was so small”, he says. “It kind of prepared me for all the stuff that would happen after that. Because the people who love Harry Potter love Harry Potter – I’m one of them. So that kind of prepared me.”
At this point Gleeson asks, with characteristic politeness, if I mind if he takes a toilet break. “I’ll press the mute button,” he says, smiling, which is thoughtful of him.
When he reappears I mention that I saw him, or his Bill Weasley hologram at least, at the Universal Studios theme park in Florida, at the beginning of the Harry Potter ride Escape from Gringotts. “I got to go there when it opened. We got to be there with a load of the Harry Potter people. We would have been some of the first people on it, which was fantastic.”
He mentions the other ride he stars in, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, at Walt Disney World in Florida. When he went on that one, staff cosplaying Star Wars roles saluted him, saying, “Good to see you working undercover, general”. I remember that ride as also incredible, but I don‘t remember Gleeson featuring in it. “How dare you? It’s some of my finest work,” he scolds, feigning indignation.
I stumble as I try to recall for Gleeson a breathtaking moment when you walk into an entire room full of, “you know, the white, scary-looking dudes that are Darth Vader’s people. What are they called?”
“I know what they’re called, but I want you to keep trying to describe them,” he says with a grin before eventually, and kindly, putting me out of my mortified misery: “Stormtroopers”.
Speaking of rides, there has been much reaction online to Gleeson‘s upcoming appearance in the film Echo Valley next month. When a photograph of his character was released, one fan declared themselves to be “running around in circles making animal noises”; another called him “SCRUMPTIOUS”. He plays a psychopathic drug dealer named Jackie, his ginger hair dyed a grungy blond, which gives him a completely new look.
He’s outstanding in the thriller, which was directed by Michael Pearce and also stars Sydney Sweeney, Julianne Moore and Fiona Shaw. Set on a Pennsylvania horse farm, the story centres around Kate, a widow played by Moore, exploring how far she’ll go to protect her troubled daughter, who is played by Sweeney. Gleeson is terrifying, kinetic and compulsively watchable in the film.
“He’s an uncomfortable fellow, isn’t he?” he says of Jackie. “You have to come up with ways to make that stuff work ... It’s about how the atmosphere changes when somebody like that is in the room ... I really enjoyed figuring that out.”
When you’re working with actors such as Moore and Sweeney, “you’re up against powerhouses, so you really have to know what you’re doing and control that space”.
Brad Ingelsby, who wrote the script – he also created and wrote Mare of Easttown, the TV series for which Moore and Kate Winslet won Emmys – consulted a police chief not far from where the film is set. When Gleeson was researching the role he spoke to the officer, too, and watched a lot of documentaries.
“Your job as an actor is to find other aspects to who he is and surprise yourself,” Gleeson says. He loved “going digging for that stuff, how to flesh him out and make him both human and threatening in ways that are unexpected”.
Finding these other aspects to roles and to himself has been important as his career has progressed. As a younger actor, he says, “I probably would have kept on playing the same kind of character if I’d been allowed to.
“I was incredibly lucky in the ways that I was enticed out of that, and it paid dividends further on. I get more ambitious not for the scale of the work but for the differences between the work as I get older. And wanting to try new things and wanting to try hard enough that you’ll fail.”
There were “people early on who saw something in me more than I thought I was capable of. I was good at playing tortured and in pain ... and I was maybe good at funny stuff.”
Then Tom Hall put him in a film called Sensation, from 2010, about a naive young Irish woman and a sex worker. “He just saw something different in me.”
Joe Wright and other directors also saw a more romantic aspect to Gleeson. “I was never ambitious on that front – didn’t think it was possible – and he convinced me I could do it and taught me how to get there.”
Gleeson namechecks Curtis and Lenny Abrahamson as other people in the industry who encouraged him to reach further and expect more from himself. I tell him that I met Curtis once and that when he discovered I was Irish he said, “Oh, I have two sets of friends in Dublin, the Gleesons on the northside and the Hewsons” – which is to say Bono and Ali – “on the southside.”
“I do love the man,” Gleeson says. “The world is a better place with him in it.”
Growing up in Malahide, in a house filled with books, creativity was encouraged. Gleeson remembers, when his father was in Braveheart, getting a camcorder and “seeing how you can cut things together, how a cut influences a feeling ...
“I thought maybe directing or writing was the way I would go. As the eldest I was the one bossing my brothers around all the time. And then, slowly, the acting thing happened. And I was very lucky that it did.”
I can’t help noticing that lucky is a word Gleeson uses a lot. He was “blessed with everything” as a child, he told me earlier, and “lucky” to be talking to journalists today.
Later, talking about studying film and broadcasting at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dún Laoghaire, he says he got “incredibly lucky” with the “insanely creative” people in his class there, many of whom are still friends. (He doesn‘t like to talk much about his personal life, but he met the film producer Juliette Bonass there, and they got married two years ago.)
Perhaps because he is so aware of his good fortune, he doesn’t bristle when I raise the subject of nepo babies and the cultural conversation around the children of famous people.
He landed an acting agent as a 16-year-old thanks to a delightfully charming acceptance speech he made on behalf of his father at the Irish Film and Television Awards. Their careers have intertwined a couple of times: his first film role was in McDonagh’s short film Six Shooter, in 2004, which starred his father; a decade later he starred with his dad again in John Michael McDonagh’s film Calvary. (The following year he also appeared with his father and brother Brian in the Enda Walsh play The Walworth Farce.)
“It’s an important conversation,” he says. “There are a lot of people whose parents are in the industry. It’s important that there is room for other people. I’ve been so lucky when it comes to what my father did and having the means to be able to pursue acting even when I wasn’t making enough money to look after myself.
“I think it’s fair for people to talk about that, and it’s important that you can acknowledge it. Otherwise you’re lying to yourself,” he says. “I also think it’s important that more people can get into the industry who don’t have the means of the majority who are in there at the moment.”
Gleeson is well known for helping to raise money for St Francis Hospice in Raheny, in north Dublin, grateful for the care they gave his late grandparents.
“My parents set an example with that,” he says. “Once you’ve seen what happens at the hospice you can‘t forget it. It’s hard to fathom, the people who work there ... how quietly they go about their wonderful work. You just don‘t know about it until it’s in front of you.”
He still lives in Dublin, and has many of the same friends, but things have changed for Gleeson in terms of his profile. More people pronounce his name correctly, for a start. He’s a long way from the time his agent called and told him about one headline that described “the rapid rise of Downhill Gleeson”.
“It was like a weird little piece of poetry that absolutely puts you in your place,” he says, laughing.
Gleeson is naturally funny in conversation, a joy to spend time with. He created the comedy Frank of Ireland with his brother Brian and his schoolfriend Michael Moloney, who wrote sketches with him for the RTÉ comedy sketch show Your Bad Self. He still gets recognised for that, he says, and regularly meets up with Moloney to write sketches “just because it’s funny”.
Gleeson and the Italian actor Sabrina Impacciatore, who played Valentina in the second season of The White Lotus, are the stars of The Paper, a mockumentary due out later this year. Created by Greg Daniels, and set in a newspaper in the US midwest, it follows on from the American version of The Office.
“I did that at the end of last year and absolutely loved it,” says Gleeson, who also recently filmed “a few scenes” with the sisters Rooney and Kate Mara for Werner Herzog‘s Bucking Fastard, which has been shooting in Ireland. “That was an incredible experience,” he says.
Gleeson hasn‘t yet lined up his next acting gig. “I’m getting itchy now. I feel like I need to get some demons out in some sort of a way,” he says. “It’s fun that Fountain of Youth and Echo Valley are coming out so close to each other, because they are both so incredibly different projects, which I think is super cool.”
Before he goes I ask about the chocolates he once told a reporter Tom Cruise has sent him every year since they starred together in American Made. Does he still send them? “I’m pretty lucky,” Gleeson says, that word popping up again. “I got lucky again this year. It’s amazing. Every year I’m, like, ‘It’s not going to happen’ – and then it happens. We’re supposed to save them for visitors, but we can’t. They’re too delicious.”
Fountain of Youth is on Apple TV+ from May 23rd; Echo Valley is on Apple TV+ from June 13th; Domhnall Gleeson will take part in a public interview with Greg Dyke at Fastnet Film Festival, in Schull, Co Cork, on Sunday, May 25th; on Saturday, May 24th, he takes part in its panel discussion Choosing the Right Project, moderated by Ed Guiney of Element Pictures and also including the director Lenny Abrahamson
