DOMHNALL GLEESON
THE PATIENT
In FX’S The Patient, Domhnall Gleeson plays a foodie named Sam Fortner who has a voracious appetite for killing—so he kidnaps his therapist Alan Strauss (Steve Carell) and chains him in his basement for round-the-clock analysis. It’s a recipe for disaster, and Gleeson— perhaps best known for playing General Hux in the Star Wars franchise—is a master at serving up the scares. Are you prepared for people to come up to you and say, “You make an excellent serial killer?” I feel so good about it. I played a person who had done similarly awful things once before in a ilm called Calvary [with his father, Brendan Gleeson], but that was for half a day, and I prepared for that for like a month ahead of time. On this, I got to do that kind of prep. I got to have this guy in my world every day to show all different sides of him. He really made me laugh even though he was such an awful person, and he was trying. And so yeah, if people come up and say you’re a good serial killer, as long as they’re talking about the show, then I’m more than happy.
When showrunner-writers Joel Fields and Joseph Weisberg first cast you, did they let you know how it was going to end? No. A lot of the conversations we had were about whether it was possible for Sam to get better, whether it was a futile wish on Sam’s part, or whether he wanted to control something in a different sort of way. Control is a big part of his life. So obviously, the ending has a lot to do with that. I didn’t know what the ending was until maybe halfway through.
What was your initial reaction to the ending? I loved it. I thought it was very emotional. I thought the letter that Alan wrote to his family was beautiful and showed his development as a patient. I thought it spoke so well of what is possible with therapy, despite the fact that it hadn’t worked out in quite the way that Sam wanted it to. But Alan said at the very beginning therapy cannot work like this if the patient has all of the power.
What was the journey like for you? It was wonderful. It felt incredibly freeing. Everybody talks about collaboration, but so few people are genuinely collaborative. Even though everyone was masked all the time and being careful around each other and not having a lot of time together off set, it was truly collaborative. Those conversations were sometimes heated and sometimes not on the same page, but they always moved forward in the best possible way, with trust that everybody wanted to make something good. It was exhausting in the way that the best work is. Sometimes there is excess enery spent on shit that isn’t important, on conversations that aren’t important, on details that aren’t important. And it sucks the life out of a production, and it kills everyone involved. This was like the other end of the scale. His job could have been a nightmare because it’s heavy with long scenes and on one set, but it wasn’t. It was insanely brilliant.