“Light From Light” star Marin Ireland says we see a different Jim Gaffigan in the drama that just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, a film that gives us the usually comedic actor in a more dramatic role.
“It’s a story about a woman who is a single mom in east Tennessee but she moonlights as a paranormal investigator and she’s asked to investigate a possible haunting in a widower’s farmhouse,” writer and director Paul Harrill told TheWrap’s Beatrice Verhoeven at TheWrap’s interview studio.
Gaffigan added, “I play the widower — he’s obviously a very good-looking widower. I live in a farmhouse and someone recommends I hire this lady to see if there are some ghost-os in the farm-o.”
“I do want to say that one of the amazing things that you do get for free with Jim in this role is that when you think about him as a guy who’s really funny and then seeing him in this role, you experience the character as having shifted,” Ireland said. “You experience the sensation of, ‘Wow, this guy has gone through something enormous’ because we think we know Jim in a different way and there’s something spectacular about that.”
The film delves into the paranormal mixed in with religion and spirituality, but attempts to leave it open-ended for the audience to make their own decisions as to what to believe.
“It’s interesting because with the paranormal, you bring that up and people think, ‘Oh, I know what type of movie that is,’” added Gaffigan. “But it’s not that at all. It’s a story point. In these two very grounded characters, she even, as she’s been exposed to more paranormal stuff, she’s not an advocate — she’s questioning it… and as an actor, you’re questioning: what are we doing, why are we here?”
And then Gaffigan dropped his mic.
Gaffigan also starred in two other films at the festival, including “Troop Zero” and “Them That Follow.”
Watch the video above.