Domhnall Gleeson isn’t Superman. But in ‘The Paper,’ he can be Clark Kent

Could Domhnall Gleeson be the savior of local journalism?

OK, maybe that’s a sensational oversell — but his latest character knows that news stories need a hook to draw readers in fast. We’re trying.

The 42-year-old Irish actor has built an impressive and diverse career, often playing people entangled in precarious situations: a young man with the ability to time travel who tries to change his past in hopes of improving his future in the heartfelt and whimsical “About Time”; the leader of a group of fur trappers working in unsettled territory in the Midwest who gets caught up in a gruesome fight for survival in “The Revenant”; or a software programmer selected to be part of an experiment with a female robot with humanlike qualities in “Ex Machina.”

Now, he’s stepping into the turbulent, you-have-to-laugh-to-keep-from-crying experience of being in the newspaper biz.

In Peacock’s “The Paper,” Gleeson plays Ned Sampson, a nerdy, well-meaning and enviably hopeful guy who has just been installed as editor in chief of the Toledo Truth Teller. His qualifications? Well, he used to sell cardboard and toilet paper, and he’s a nepo baby with a journalism degree. And he’s coming in with earnest intentions: to motivate a small staff that has grown restless and dissatisfied with its their profession — succumbing to the unsavory demands of the job in 2025, like selecting a wire story about Elizabeth Olsen’s nighttime skin routine only to discover it exceeds the allotted print space — and revive, or in some cases kick off, their desire to do responsible local journalism that delivers useful and effectual information to the community.

“When I was a kid, I didn’t want to be Superman; I wanted to be Clark Kent,” Ned says in the first episode. “Because to me, Clark is the real superhero. He’s saving the world, too, by working at a newspaper. And that, to me, is much more noble and much more achievable, and I love that.”

It’s a romantic — some might say naive — ideal that hasn’t been squeezed dry by cynicism. And as someone in an industry as handcuffed to budgets and the bottom line as any, Gleeson can relate to that wide-eyed objective to do meaningful work even when it’s been overpowered by economic forces.

“The first time you do something, the wonder of it is huge,” Gleeson says on a recent day. “You only see the good stuff — or I did, at least. Then as you get older, you do get a little more tired. It’s a little harder to get up in the morning. The industry that I’m in, I’m constantly amazed at the people, older than me, who’ve retained their youthful enthusiasm for it. I find that very aspirational. I think, despite some of the cliches that there are around acting — and around journalism — that you’ll find a lot of people who really, really believe in it into their 50s, 60s, 70s.”

But “The Paper” is a spinoff of “The Office” — in the loosest sense — so this isn’t a soapbox. Still, it tugs on a topical issue within its comedy. (We’ll get to that.) First, though, it’s important to understand the connective tissue to its predecessor: the same mockumentary crew that filmed the mundane, silly and often completely relatable 9-to-5 lives of the staff at Scranton’s Dunder Mifflin has now set its sights on a newsroom of uninspired misfits trying to keep the ship above water as it navigates the wrecking waves of modern journalism. And to help bridge “The Office” to this workplace, former Dunder Mifflin accountant Oscar Martinez (played by Oscar Núñez) now works as an accountant at the paper.

As a fan of “The Office,” Gleeson says playing in the mockumentary format brought a unique layer to how he thought about his character: “How does he [Ned] feel about them being in this place where he’s trying to do well as a new boss? You start to think … he’ll want the good stuff on the record. If he does something that he feels is good, he’ll probably want to make sure they got it. And if something’s not going as planned, he will try to hide away. When we were shooting, it was interesting because I’d find myself between our two camera operators and almost looking to them from time to time in a similar way — like, ‘What did they think?’”

Gleeson is beaming in from Scotland, where he’s been for the last month filming an as-yet-unannounced independent film. He quickly apologizes for his hair — in all of its shaggy, slightly curled glory — as he combs his fingers through it: “I’ve got a perm. Life is good.”

He says he wasn’t necessarily looking to do a TV series right now, but when “The Paper” came along, he was eager to dive into its comedic trenches.

But he first made sure to check in with at least two of the original cast members from “The Office” : Steve Carell and John Krasinski. Carell, who played the show’s bumbling boss Michael Scott for seven seasons, starred opposite Gleeson in FX’s 2022 psychological thriller “The Patient,” about a troubled man with homicidal urges (Gleeson) who holds his therapist (Carell) captive. And Krasinski, whose role as the show’s dry-witted paper salesman Jim Halpert propelled him to stardom, starred alongside Gleeson in this year’s heist action-adventure film, “Fountain of Youth,” directed by Guy Ritchie.

“What’s great about both those guys,” he says, “is it wasn’t like, ‘You should do this, you should do that.’ They each said, ‘I think it would be great. I think you would have loads of fun. I think you could do something really good.’ And that was it. I jumped.”

He adds: “And don’t forget, when they did the show, they were under a lot of scrutiny because the U.K. ‘Office’ was such a masterpiece and had been so heralded, and they still found their space. It took a little time, but they found it. I’m just hoping for the same for us — that we find our space.”

Still, he’s aware fans of the U.S. “Office,” which ran for nine seasons and is one of the most streamed series today, might be reluctant to give “The Paper” a try. And that those who do, might be quick to make comparisons or feel the impulse to see whether these new characters fit the archetypes of the original — for example, is Ned more like a Michael or more like a Jim?

“I feel like what we have is different enough to be its own thing,” he says. “My belief is Ned’s different to both of those characters. He is a new boss in a job he is unqualified for to a certain degree, and he carries a different eternal ambition and optimism about it that sets him apart. There will always be overlaps, but it’s different enough that people will, hopefully, take him on his own merits.”

Created by Greg Daniels, who adapted the American version of “The Office,” and Michael Koman (“How to With John Wilson,” “Nathan for You”), the series arrives at a particularly fraught and existential moment in journalism. Each passing week brings a sobering headline about how news organizations are either adapting or shuttering because of rapid economical, technological and cultural shifts, as well as responding to political pressure.

“First and foremost, the show needs to work in terms of comedy,” Gleeson says. “I also think that the press has always been under threat to some degree. There are always people in power who don’t want the thing printed that doesn’t make them look good or they don’t like. But right now feels full-on extreme.”

However, he believes Daniels and Koman care deeply about journalism and journalists. So how do you make something funny without being too satirical or negative?

“They show both sides of it — the idealism and the difficulty to live up to those ideals,” Gleeson says. “If it was a show where everybody did good journalism, I don’t know how funny people are going to find it. I think what’s funny about this is people trying to do good journalism and not really living up to it all the time.”

Daniels and Koman, who spoke together on a separate video call, say that if “The Office” was a story of people who were very uninspired in their work, “The Paper” is a story of how people can be inspired in their work. And the key was finding someone to be the leader of a bleak endeavor who was a decent person and could boost morale.

“To me, he’s in that category of people like Jimmy Stewart — he can be so funny, but he’s brimming with humanity and emotion,” Koman says, pointing to Gleeson’s performance in “Black Mirror” as a man brought back to life as an android using his social media posts. “I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh’ — that he could play the same person basically, but still there are subtle differences between these two people. I have no idea how he does it. But I thought, if he could do that, he can do anything.”

Plus, Gleeson had comedic chops, and you want somebody who is simultaneously funny and emotionally available, Koman says. Daniels adds that he’d be happy to have someone like the actor as a boss.

“I was in a job, at one point, that everybody thought was cool, but it was very dysfunctionally run. I remember telling people that I thought it would have been more fun to work at, say, Enterprise car rental if the boss was fun and the spirit was good,” Daniels says. “We needed someone who seems like a fun guy and a very sincere person and has a sense of mission. And the thing is, it’s a very hard mission — it’s almost impossibly hard to imagine he’s [Ned] going to turn the clock backwards and restore this grand institution. But he’s trying, and it’s a valuable thing to do. When he says, ‘I want to be Clark Kent’ — that was one of his [Gleeson‘s] things; he added that notion when he was thinking about the character.”

Because Gleeson is nothing if not intentional about comedy.

The son of actor Brendan Gleeson, Domhnall describes himself as a shy kid growing up; but seeing people not be shy who could really make him laugh “loudly in a way that was embarrassing,” he says, was a feeling he craved. He names funnymen like Peter Sellers and Jim Carrey and British sketch shows like “Smack the Pony” and all-things “Monty Python” as favorites. His first job as an actor was in Martin McDonagh’s unruly black comedy “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” with a plot that hinges on a mangled cat. In his 20s, he wrote and starred in the Irish sketch comedy show “Your Bad Self” — one memorable skit involved a group of friends en route to a concert and one guy (Gleeson) in the backseat has drunk too much lemonade. Short on time and believing he only has to pee, a friend hands him a soda bottle mid-drive, only to watch him drop his trousers and squat over the bottle.

“Now, Jim Carrey is a unicorn — I’m aware of my limitations,” he says, quick to let it be known that he is not an improv genius. “That’s not what I’m going for. I remember seeing ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ and that making me laugh and sort of cry. You’ve got a bunch of amazing actors who do comedy and drama all the time, but then you’ve got Gene Hackman and Anjelica Huston doing something totally different and just full of pathos. That’s a different sort of class of acting that’s also comedic. All those things made me fall in love with it.”

He’s brought that blend of pathos, uniqueness and nerve to the comedy turns he’s taken on over the years — including in the 2013 film “About Time,” HBO’s romance-thriller-comedy “Run” and Prime Video’s “Frank of Ireland,” which he created and starred in with his brother Brian. He approaches “The Paper” with the same level of intrigue for truth. He didn’t do any intensive shadowing of journalists ahead of filming the show, but he did do some shoe-leather reporting — he spoke to and observed young reporters in Cincinnati and Toledo, and he visited a college newspaper in Ohio.

“What I took away from my experience was the fact that young people are still getting into it,” he says. “I found that immensely heartening, even though they know that, not that the odds are stacked against journalism, but that it is a harder business to get into. It’s a harder business to last in. It’s a harder business to make a living in than it used to be and there are fewer positions available. Despite all that, people are still going into it because they care about it — and that vibrancy, despite the odds, I found really cool.”

We’re sure Clark Kent would agree.