Domhnall Gleeson has already entered the worlds of Harry Potter and Star Wars. But, thankfully he’s stayed out of Middle-earth.
Otherwise his The Incomer character’s comical retelling of Lord of the Rings might’ve been too meta for comfort.
“When they were looking at copyright issues and would it be okay to make up this Lord of the Rings story, one of the problems was director [Louis Paxton] was like we couldn’t really look at the other big franchises,” Gleeson revealed in an exclusive interview with SYFY Wire. “Because I was in Harry Potter, I was in Star Wars, those two were immediately ruled out, so we were stuck with Lord of the Rings. But I think it all worked out well.”
Meanwhile, Gleeson had no trouble locking down the perfect hairstyle ahead of filming The Incomer, described as modern take on a fairy tale set on a remote Scottish island.
“I got an actual perm in Dublin, because I wanted him to have a good silhouette,” he said of Daniel’s increasingly disheveled appearance. “I’ve already got a big head, but I wanted a bigger silhouette, like this lollipop that turns up on the island and that as it goes on, it just sort of gets bigger.”
Daniel is a social worker who becomes endeared by the island-dwelling, magic-believing siblings he was sent to evict.
For Gleeson, filming on location in the “breathtakingly beautiful” Scottish isles was a bonus but at least one scene had its drawbacks.
“We had to get in the sea in Scotland and it was absolutely Baltic,” Gleeson shared. “We were supposed to be having a nice swimming lesson for some of it, so that’s probably the best acting I have in the film is pretending that like my heart isn’t about to stop in the freezing cold water.”
After Daniel convinces Isla and Sandy (Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke) to give the mainland a go, Gleeson has a good idea on where he took the reformed islanders first.
“He’s taking them to a posh brunch place and getting them avocado on toast,” The Paper star guessed. “I think he’s just getting the avocado out of the way quickly, so that they understand what mainland life is really all about. He would have them near the sea all the time, so they never feel too far away from what they know.”
The Incomer invades theaters Sept. 25.
