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Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson continues his impressive career trajectory with his latest role in Werner Herzog’s highly anticipated film BUCKING FASTARD, which recently wrapped production in Dublin, Sligo, and Slovenia. The film is expected to make its debut at the Cannes Film Festival this month, where it will be shown to potential buyers in what promises to be one of the festival’s most talked-about screenings.

Gleeson, who has steadily built a reputation for taking on challenging and diverse roles since his breakthrough in ABOUT TIME, joins an impressive ensemble that includes real-life siblings Kate and Rooney Mara as the film’s central characters. In recent years, Gleeson has demonstrated remarkable versatility, moving effortlessly between indie darlings and major franchises, making his casting in Herzog’s return to narrative filmmaking particularly noteworthy.

In BUCKING FASTARD, Gleeson portrays Timothy, a government-issued social worker tasked with helping the eccentric Holbrooke twins adapt to modern life after they become unexpected tabloid sensations. The Mara sisters play Jean and Joan Holbrooke, inseparable twins who live on the fringes of society and share an extraordinary bond – speaking in unison, loving the same man, sharing identical dreams, and even making the same linguistic slips simultaneously. Their quest to find “the Orkneys,” an imaginary land where true love exists, leads them to attempt the impossible: digging a tunnel through an entire mountain range. This marks the first on-screen collaboration between Kate and Rooney Mara, with the latter having previously filmed in Ireland for Jim Sheridan’s THE SECRET SCRIPTURE.

The legendary Werner Herzog, whose last narrative feature was released in 2022 with his documentary THEATER OF THOUGHT, describes BUCKING FASTARD as completing “an operatic triptych” with his previous acclaimed works FITZCARRALDO and GRIZZLY MAN. “We cannot see the world as Jean and Joan Holbrooke see it,” Herzog explained, “but we do see how the world reacts to them – through the courts and the press, through those that want to help and those who want to use them, through the eyes of beasts both tame and wild, and even through their own echoes in the core of the earth.”