Comes after five months on his couch in London where Domhnall Gleeson managed to escape his knackered movie-star life. Not a thing he misses is travelling to his family home in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland where he has a taste for fishing, table tennis and a Stornoway oyster a day.
Film-maker (and cousin of Star Wars’ “young Han Solo” actor Alden Ehrenreich) Declan Quinn has been documenting all this on a new short project called Nambia Feels That Crackle in the Air. “It was the actors who were hiding that were struggling. I can’t tell you how many times I ran out of the room when they were struggling and felt like giving up,” he says. “Sometimes you’re like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ But then that spark turns into something else, you start to make your own light, the excitement comes, and you keep pushing.”
One recent afternoon, for example, Quinn received a phone call from Lord Strathclyde, the 12th Baronet of London after the actors complained about how uncomfortable their costumes were during filming. But while she was the first Lord Strathclyde in 50 years, that’s all these guys had to go on, he says. “I didn’t know the real Strathclyde. The newspapers are saying that the Duke of Marlborough was so rude. That wouldn’t have happened to him. What I can say is that he was keen to listen to what the actors were saying, and the ideas were very much bandied about.”
Yet the children playing in the nearby park were battling their own great thirst. It was a perfect weather day, and two actors playing rugby descended on Quinn. “They were almost naked, but there was champagne, so I had to have champagne for them,” he says. “But, you know, it was nice.”