DOMHNALL GLEESON

The Patient (FX/Hulu)

In FX/Hulu’s The Patient, Gleeson plays Sam Fortner, a patient of therapist Alan Strauss (Steve Carell), whom Fortner is holding hostage in a basement where he reveals himself to be a serial killer. On his most challenging scene, Gleeson muses: “There was a scene at the end of episode five that I remember being a bit chunky. It ended up taking about 10 minutes of the episode, and it was sort of a culmination of the first half of the series.”

By this time in the show, Fortner has taken another captive, Elias (Alex Rich), and is fighting the urge to kill him by engaging in therapy with Strauss. “At the end of episode five, I go to do it,” says Gleeson. “Alan wakes up and stops me on my way. At the very beginning of the scene, we have a long discussion. He tells me stuff I don’t want to hear about why he thinks I kill people, and then suggests that we have therapy with Elias, and I bring him out. That builds to me killing him, eventually. It turns out to be a horrible idea by Alan Strauss.” The heightened moment still required Gleeson to ground himself and find patience in character. “It was just chunky,” he continues. “He just wants to kill him at every moment. And yet the scene can’t just be that for 10 minutes. Otherwise, it’ll be boring. The writing was superb, but just finding all the waves of it was tricky.”

Balancing the different sides of Fortner proved difficult, as well. “Part of him is deeply traumatized, and expresses himself through extreme physical violence,” explains Gleeson. “There’s this aspect of him which is totally animal, totally stunted and teenage and childish in almost a funny way. And then he’s also a complicated grown up who has gone through a divorce, and is, a lot of times, subduing an aspect of himself which he hates and trying to be a better person.”