Abrahamson was offered a scholarship to study for a PhD in philosophy at
Stanford University. He abandoned his studies after six months and returned to Ireland to take up filmmaking, initially directing commercials, including a popular series of adverts for
Carlsberg. His first film was
Adam & Paul, a black comedy about a pair of heroin addicts making their way around Dublin in search of a fix. His next film was 2007's
Garage, starring
Pat Shortt as a lonely petrol station attendant in rural Ireland. Both films won the
IFTA award for best film. Also in 2007,
RTÉ screened Abrahamson's four-part TV miniseries
Prosperity, written in collaboration with
Mark O'Halloran, the co-writer of
Adam and Paul and
Garage. Like those two films,
Prosperity depicts people on the fringes of Irish society, with each one-hour episode focusing on a specific character, including an alcoholic, a single mother, and an asylum seeker.
Prosperity was nominated for six Irish Film and Television Awards in 2008 and won in two categories, Best Directing for Abrahamson and Best Script for O'Halloran. In 2012, Abrahamson won his third IFTA for best film with
What Richard Did. In a December 2012 interview with
Eurochannel, Abrahamson said he was working on a film called
Frank, set in Britain, Ireland, and the United States, saying: "It's a comedy about a young musician who joins an eccentric band led by an enigmatic singer called Frank. It's a kind of road movie, strange, funny and quite original, I hope. It stars
Michael Fassbender and
Domhnall Gleeson."
Frank premiered at the
Sundance Film Festival in January 2014. It is about an eccentric musician modeled after
Frank Sidebottom. It stars
Michael Fassbender,
Domhnall Gleeson and
Maggie Gyllenhaal. Abrahamson next directed the film adaptation of
Emma Donoghue's
novel Room (2015), for which he received his first
Academy Award nomination. The film was successful, both critically and commercially. In 2014, it was announced that Abrahamson would direct an adaptation of
Laird Hunt's
Civil War novel
Neverhome. In 2015, Abrahamson was working on ''A Man's World'', a film based on
Emile Griffith's
boxing rivalry with
Benny Paret. In 2016, it was confirmed that Abrahamson was attached to direct an adaptation of
Neal Bascomb's book
The Grand Escape, a true story about three daredevil
World War I pilots held in Germany's most infamous
POW prison. The story chronicles the war's greatest mass prison escape and the pilots' subsequent flight to freedom. A writer to adapt the book has not yet been attached.
Element Pictures and
Film4 Productions are producing. == Personal life ==