Domnhall Gleeson terrorizes Steve Carell in ‘The Patient’
nypost.com10-part FX series, premiering Aug. 30 exclusively on Hulu, revolves around Sam Fortner (Domnhall Gleeson), a patient with daddy issues, and his therapist, Dr.
Alan Strauss (Steve Carell), who’s mourning the recent death of his wife and his estrangement from his grown son.On the surface, it all seems typical enough, until Sam kidnaps Alan, chains him up in his basement, unmasks himself as the strangler known as “The John Doe Killer” — and demands that Alan cure him of his compulsions … or else. “It’s an interesting proposition,” Gleeson, 39, told The Post. “[Series creators] Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg were into the notion of making Sam … not as relatable as possible but as normal as possible.
Yet there’s this huge thing — he wants to get better, yet if he were truly empathetic there’s a quick way to deal with all of this, which is to turn himself in, and he’s not choosing to do that.“His selfishness is at the core of what he’s doing and yet he’s trying,” he said. “I think that’s very relatable for a lot of people; everyone is selfish and most people are trying to be better people — but this is pushing that to the furthest extreme.”That’s an understatement.
Alan’s legcuff confines him to a short perimeter around the bed on which he sleeps in the roomy basement, decked out in ’70s-era decor, but it’s close enough to the chair in which he sits opposite Sam, who drinks a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee during their enforced therapy sessions.
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