One Nightstand With Domhnall Gleeson

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

For Domhnall Gleeson, there’s no better recommender of books than his mother, Mary. “On Christmas morning, [my parents] would put stuff in our socks and oftentimes you’d get a book in your sock,” says Gleeson, one of four sons born to Mary and her husband, actor Brendan Gleeson. “She got one for my brother one year, and I think it was a Chuck Palahniuk book. He read out the back of it to all of us on Christmas morning. It was about a woman who has sex with 150 people on camera in a day. And it’s told from the perspective of man number 2, man number 73… We were like, mam.”

Gleeson is recalling Palahniuk’s 2008 satirical novel, Snuff, which tells the story of an adult film star who has sex with 600 men on camera. I ask how old his brother was when he got the book in his Christmas stocking. “Oh, this was five years ago. I mean, no, we weren’t children,” he says, laughing. “That’s important. No, no, no… Depending on our age, that’s a very different story.”

That Gleeson, 43, is still receiving a Christmas stocking from his parents is perhaps a hallmark of what he describes as a “lucky” childhood. “I grew up in a very happy family,” he says of his early years, in which he often spoke Irish at home. “I was not just fluent, but I could talk forever up until I was 12 and I studied it up until I was 18. And now it is terrifyingly gone.”

Gleeson’s father, Brendan, who received an Oscar nomination for 2022’s The Banshees of Inisherin, only became a professional actor in his 30s, and it’s his career before that Gleeson cites as a profound influence. “My parents were teachers, so big into reading, big into telling stories, with books everywhere,” he says. “What I really remember was that when I used to read when I was a kid, I would sort of go sort of deaf. I would lose sense of the world around me. And I remember my mom saying, ‘We called you in for dinner 16 times,’ and I just didn’t hear her.”

Gleeson’s love of reading has continued into adulthood, and the books he has selected for our conversation are diverse in form — a play, a novel, a short story, a novella, and a children’s book — but they all have something in common. “Death is just at the center of all of them really,” he says, smiling. “I only realized that afterwards, and it’s quite an Irish thing.”

Gleeson’s own career choices have been far more varied. His early work concentrated on the stage, before he broke out as Bill Weasley in the Harry Potter series. Since then, his slate has included sci-fi (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), rom-com (About Time), psychological thriller (The Patient), and drama (Brooklyn). This month, Gleeson is serving up a characteristically original combination of projects. First, comes the second season of The Paper, Peacock’s The Office spin-off, while Sept. 25 sees Gleeson star in The Incomer, an eccentric Scottish comedy about a brother and sister living on a remote island who are told they need to move to the mainland by Gleeson’s bureaucratic administrator.

The different challenges are part of the appeal. “On The Incomer, you have your script months before you shoot, you work on your dialect, you work on what you want to bring to everything,” he says. “With films, you have challenges you’ve set for every scene and you know the overall arc, and that’s the joy of the film. On TV, well, certainly on this TV, but you can get scripts at the weekend and you’re shooting on Monday. It is last minute. What you’re trying to do is make it feel alive and give it life, but also make sure that the character is not slipping away and that it all feels honest and funny.”

Gleeson has succeeded in striking both notes in the new season of The Paper, where he plays the idealistic Ned, who’s falling for the cynical but ideologically aligned Mare (Chelsea Frei) as the pair try to revive a dying newspaper. “I think this series is funnier than the first series,” he says. “Chelsea gets angry at me because I’m really in it and she gets the giggles a lot. And so she’s like, ‘Well, you just don’t think I’m funny.’ I’m like, ‘No, I think you’re really funny.’ But actually she’s so great in some of the scenes. I’m like, ‘If I laugh now, I destroy it.’ So you stay in it and you double down.”

Keep reading to discover more about Gleeson’s five favorite books.

His first pick is Matilda by Roald Dahl. He’s a longtime fan of the author but only recently picked up the 1988 classic again while shopping for his nieces. “It’s also about the pleasure of reading, and intelligence is rewarded,” he says. “There’s a good teacher in it, a great teacher, and [it’s about] what a difference that can make in a child’s life.”

It’s not the only Dahl book Gleeson grew up on. “I remember being in bunk beds, and I was trying to go to sleep and there was a copy of The Witches on the floor. I remember being scared by those amazing illustrations by Quentin Blake,” he says. “It said that a witch would often be the last person you would think it would be, and I remember hearing my mom laughing in the kitchen and going, ‘Oh no, I’m going to have to try and see her feet and see if she has toes or not.’”

His second pick is Ballyturk, a dark philosophical comedy by Irish playwright Enda Walsh. The play focuses on two unnamed characters (referred to as One and Two) who are trapped in a room and survive through telling stories. In the middle, a third enters and informs them that one must stay and one must leave the room to die. “Enda apparently wrote it when his daughter was asking him questions about death,” he says. “I think he wrote this as some sort of a way of trying to explain what that is.”

Gleeson and Walsh have collaborated several times before, including a 2015 run of The Walworth Farce in Dublin, which also featured his father and brother. He also starred in Walsh’s absurdist play Medicine at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2021. “It was the most full-on working experience of my life, I think,” he says. “It was during COVID. We were only allowed 50 people in at a time, so everyone was spaced out. I had to lose my mind in the play, and I do think I lost my mind for a while.”

His third selection is Flannery O’Connor’s 1953 classic short story A Good Man Is Hard To Find, which follows a family on a fatal collision course with an escaped convict known as The Misfit. The dark, twisty tale was another recommendation from his mother. “I’d read loads of her stories years and years and years ago, and then my mother recently was like, ‘I read a great book’ and she gave me this,” he says. “And I was like, ‘For f*ck’s sake, mam.’ But that’s her taste.”

His fourth choice is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, an iconic 2005 dystopian novel set at an English boarding school. Told from the perspective of a carer named Kathy H., the story promises a bleak ending for many of its characters. “Ishiguro has just the meticulous way of guiding you through this with [Kathy’s] beautiful voice. She’s a very beautiful protagonist,” he says. “She’s not judgmental of anybody. She’s not judgmental of her situation. And she’s not angry about her situation. There’s something about the acceptance of it that is the heartbreak.”

Gleeson also had a small supporting role in the 2010 film adaptation starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley. “I got to meet Kazuo Ishiguro, and he signed a copy of his book for me and I know him a little bit,” he says. “I had auditioned for the lead role in it and not gotten it, but everyone just knew it was a special project. It was incredible just to be around all those amazing actors. They just continued to do all this amazing work afterwards.”

His final choice is The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain, a 1934 crime noir novel about a woman who plots the murder of her husband with her lover. When Gleeson first read it in his 20s, he couldn’t believe a book “sexy and murdery” was written nearly 100 years ago.

“It’s so sexual. She says, ‘Bite me. Bite me,’ the first time they kiss, and he bites her and blood hits the back of his mouth and she likes that. Then blood is running down her throat as he carries her upstairs,” he says. “You’re like, ‘What the f*ck is going on? Is it in the 30s? How is that allowed?’"

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