Domhnall Gleeson has been candid about plenty of rough shoots, but nothing compares to what he says happened before The Revenant even started filming. One dinner, one toast from his director, and he knew exactly what he was in for.
The Toast That Warned Domhnall Gleeson What Was Coming
Speaking on Hits Radio‘s My Life In Movies poscast, Gleeson was asked when he first realized the shoot would be more intense than he’d anticipated. He didn’t hesitate. It happened right at the beginning, over a dinner with director Alejandro González Iñárritu before production properly began.
“I want you to be in pain,” he recalled Iñárritu‘s warning.
Gleeson said everyone at the table just raised their glasses back and kept chatting like it was a completely normal toast. He joked that he could bleep out his real reaction, but his honest thought in the moment was closer to oh no. Actors, he added, usually have it easiest on most sets, but this time the cast came close to matching what the crew went through.
The host also brought up a line from the film itself, joking about the shrinking crew count using dialogue from Tom Hardy’s character.
“We were 45 men when it started. Now we’re 10, almost nine.”
Gleeson further added that art imitated life more than people realize on that shoot. He was just as clear that the suffering paid off on screen, calling the finished film excellent and noting the hardest stretches were exactly where Leonardo DiCaprio‘s presence mattered most, since he led from the front and kept everyone else moving.
Asked for his single toughest moment, Gleeson pointed to a scene on a bridge, when the crew was already halfway across a river and still had to keep going because turning back would have cost them the shot entirely.
Iñárritu’s reputation for punishing shoots was already well documented by the time The Revenant premiered, but hearing it framed as a literal dinner toast adds a new layer to just how upfront he was about it from day one.
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