“It was fucking awful”: the movie that turned Domhnall Gleeson into a “food pervert”
If you were to ask Domhnall Gleeson what the most difficult movie role he’s ever had to play might be, you’d imagine there would be a fair few to choose from, not least because he made the sassy bunny animation Peter Rabbit in 2018, and that may well have necessitated spending time in a booth with James Corden.
While that does indeed sound like a horrendous experience, Gleeson has also done movies that require him as an actor to endure conditions that really do seem like they would suck, not least Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Revenant in 2015, a movie in which everyone involved looks like they are absolutely freezing cold for the entirety of the three-hour runtime.
But actually, it wasn’t that Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar-winner that Gleeson remembers as the most arduous of his filmmaking experiences, for that honour instead goes to 2014’s Unbroken, the World War II drama starring Jack O’Connell that served as Angelina Jolie’s second film as a director and was co-written by the Coen brothers.
It told the story of a pair of army officers captured by the Japanese after ditching their plane into the sea and surviving for weeks on a raft, only to end up in a prisoner of war camp. Playing the part of Lt Russell ‘Phil’ Phillips in the movie proved to be a challenge, to say the least, for Gleeson, mainly because he had to lose nigh-on two stones in weight in just seven weeks for the part, leading to him looking enviously at food shoppers.
He told The Guardian, “It turned me into a food pervert. I was just wandering round supermarkets staring at people buying cashew nuts and thinking, ‘You fuckers’. It was fucking awful”.
He also suffered a crisis of confidence that he might have been cut out of the film altogether in the edit, which proved to be unfounded, adding, “I finished it and thought, ‘If I end up not in that movie, I’m going to go fucking nuts’. But every time you’re not the lead, you run the risk of being cut from a movie”.
Fortunately for Gleeson, it led to a massively prolific 12 years or so, which have seen him do everything from Star Wars movies (with 2017’s The Last Jedi) to spin-offs of The Office US with last year’s acclaimed sitcom The Paper alongside comedian Tim Key. Rather like Key’s own award-winning movie, The Ballad of Wallis Island, the actor’s most recent film, The Incomer, focuses on events on an isle off the coast of the UK.
It is also a comedy and has had some rave reviews since its release early this year, enough in fact for a major studio to pick it up after showings at the Sundance Festival in order to give it a full US release later in 2026. Gleeson, meanwhile, has started filming on a new Werner Herzog movie, titled Bucking Fastard and co-starring sisters Rooney Mara and Kate Mara.
The film represents German directing legend Herzog’s first movie since 2019’s Family Romance, LLC, although he has helmed several natural history movies in the interim. Orlando Bloom will also feature in the project, which tells the true story of two identical sisters with their own language who become obsessed with the same man, resulting in their being issued a restraining order.
