Peter Rabbit star a perfectionist
Domhnall Gleeson’s new film has caused controversy – and it’s not the only thing that’s worrying the actor, discovers Elizabeth Day.
On the Internet Movie Database, there is a potted biography for the actor Domhnall Gleeson that includes the sub-heading Trademarks.
Under this, three items are listed: ‘‘Irish accent. Tall, slender build. Red hair.’’
When I meet Gleeson in a Dublin hotel, I tell him – and he laughs. ‘‘I should have a tm above my head at all times,’’ he says. Sitting cross-legged on an armchair, Gleeson is all angles and awkwardness. His hair is neatly brushed to one side and, in the afternoon light, looks more pale strawberry blond than outright ginger. ‘‘No, it’s quite red,’’ he insists. ‘‘I mean, there’s no pretending it’s any other colour.’’ A quiet child, Gleeson would spend hours alone, writing stories. ‘‘I really wanted to disappear, I think,’’ he says. ‘‘And a massive, big head of red hair doesn’t help you do that.’’
But then, nor does a successful career as a movie star. Now 34, Gleeson has already featured in an astonishing variety of films. He appeared as Bill Weasley in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Part 2, before going on to play the time-travelling lead in the 2013 Richard Curtis romcom About Time; an emaciated World War II soldier lost at sea in Unbroken the following year; a conflicted 19th-century fur trader in The Revenant (2015) and General Hux in the Star Wars franchise. This month, he’s starring in Sony’s Peter Rabbit, a live-action/ animation hybrid, playing a modern-day Mr McGregor.
In 2015, a year in which he had supporting roles in four Oscarnominated films, Variety magazine named him one of the top 11 ‘‘scene-stealers’’ in the business. ‘‘Well, scene-stealer sounds like a bad thing, right, because that sounds like you’re drawing focus, which is not good,’’ he says. ‘‘I like disappearing into stuff actually. That’s what I like.’’
Ah, there’s that word again. Disappearance seems an oddly self-effacing aspiration, when most actors crave the spotlight and the prizes. Where is his ambition?
‘‘I definitely have that in me,’’ he says. ‘‘But I think it’s realistic ambition, as opposed to out-ofcontrol ambition, which leads you to defeat yourself.’’
Still, he’s a perfectionist, constantly measuring himself against rigorously high standards – the function, perhaps, of being the son of one of Ireland’s most revered actors, Brendan Gleeson.
Domhnall (pronounced doughnull) was born in Dublin, the eldest of four brothers. His mother, Mary, was a welfare officer and his father a teacher who packed it in at the age of 34 to pursue the seemingly far-fetched dream of becoming an actor. Amazingly, Brendan did it – going on to star in such hits as Braveheart and Gangs of New York – but I can’t help thinking of Domhnall’s mother, wondering how on earth they were going to support a young family now that her husband had given up his regular salary.
Gleeson Jr attended the local Malahide Community School where he took part in drama productions. Later, he studied media arts at the Dublin Institute of Technology before making his name in Ireland by appearing in a TV comedy called Your Bad Self, which featured one memorable sketch in which Gleeson defecates in a bottle on a long car journey. When he’s recognised on the street in Dublin, where he lives with the film producer Juliette Bonass, it’ll just as frequently be random strangers shouting at him to ‘‘s... in the bottle!’’ as it is fans of Star Wars or Harry Potter.
Gleeson says that his father has been an ‘‘amazing’’ support throughout his career. ‘‘Dad said to me early on – and it felt like fatherly advice as opposed to actorly advice – ‘If you don’t think of yourself as being able to be attractive, nobody else will’.
‘‘I was used to playing the victim [in films] and I was good at it... If it was something where somebody got hurt or was being bullied or whatever I was always attracted to that character – and never read anything romantic.’’
A mental switch flicked and then About Time came along, and Gleeson played a romantic lead with such success that one critic dubbed him ‘‘a ginger Hugh Grant’’.
One reason he was drawn to Peter Rabbit is because he wanted some fun in his life. His role of Thomas McGregor (who is the nephew of the rabbit-hating Mr McGregor portrayed in the original Beatrix Potter books) involves a lot of slapstick.
There’s been a bit of a rumpus around one particular scene in which Mr McGregor is pelted with blackberries, despite the character’s life-threatening allergy to the fruit, and has to inject himself with an Epipen after one lands in his mouth. Groups for allergy sufferers called on parents to boycott the film, labelling it ‘‘socially irresponsible’’, and Sony issued a formal apology. What did Gleeson make of it all?
‘‘Well, you can ask but it’s not really an argument I want any part of,’’ he says and his entire manner changes from warm Irish twinkle to clipped froideur. ‘‘A lot of stuff happens to my character in that film. Getting electrocuted [as Mr McGregor does in another scene] is also bad for you. But if you were a parent of a kid [with allergies] I totally get that you would say, ‘I brought them to see what I thought was a family film, this thing has happened and it’s going to make them feel self-conscious’.’’
I’m surprised he seems so defensive, given that he must have anticipated I would ask. But for all his cheery politeness, I get the sense Gleeson never entirely relaxes. He repeatedly makes reference to things he might have said to journalists in the past or points out new angles. It’s as if he is playing out the interview in his own head and analysing how it might all sound, rather than just saying what he feels.
He’s a worrier, it seems. It’s why, at home in Dublin, Gleeson likes ‘‘everything being in its place’’. He organises his sock drawer and recently started putting a tennis ball in his tumbledryer because someone told him it made your towels fluffy. ‘‘I can be pernickety sometimes,’’ he says, before launching into a blow-byblow account of how the tennis ball works and how he’s worried his tumble-dryer might catch fire so he leaves the door open when it’s on and how he also puts in some Lenor sheets with every load to prevent static. He stops himself, then grins. ‘‘This is quite a sad glimpse into a very lonely man.’’
Well, perhaps. But it’s nice, in the end, to find something Gleeson feels totally relaxed talking about. – The Daily Telegraph After weekend previews in select cinemas this weekend, (PG) opens nationwide on March 29.