By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
Domhnall Gleeson is having, by his own account, an awkward time being talked about. Someone on the set of his new film The Incomer — he suspects co-star Gayle Rankin — coined the phrase "the summer of Domhnall," and it has, per Gleeson, spread across the internet since. He is mortified. "The worry is that somebody will say this to me now thinking that I believe it," he told The Guardian at a London hotel. "It's certainly not something I'm trying to push … but it would be great if it could be the headline."
The joke works because it's true. Since breaking out in the Harry Potter films, Gleeson has built a career on sheer range rather than a single persona: romantic leads, cartoonish villains, comic fools, a memorable cameo in a Taylor Swift video. He is, as the paper's profile puts it, ubiquitous without being especially famous — a working actor's career dressed up as a movie star's.
In conversation, by the reporter's description, he is charming, funny, garrulous — the kind of guest a chatshow booker dreams of. Gleeson allows that this might simply be good acting. But the profile suggests something more grounded: a genuinely good-natured, unshowy person who has found a way to be everywhere on screen while staying largely out of the tabloids' reach.
It is a neat trick, and possibly an instructive one, in an industry that usually demands its leading men pick a lane. Gleeson's lane, it turns out, is all of them — quietly, and preferably without a headline.
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I finished it so you'd know.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."