Aidan Gillen strolls through Palmerston Park in Dublin wearing sunglasses and takes a seat beside me on a bench. He has just finished having his photo taken for this magazine spread. “Over there, in the trees,” he says, taking the glasses off and putting them in his pocket. “I told the photographer it was like that Morrissey photo, but he didn’t know which one I meant.”
He’s talking about a photo shoot from the Smiths’ earliest days. I look it up later. It’s 1983 and the tousle-haired, intense Mancunian, on the brink of indie-pop domination, poses beneath the leaves of a willow tree in a London park. Mention of Morrissey makes me think of a famous Smiths song and I wonder to myself if heaven knows Gillen is miserable now, stuck on a park bench with The Irish Times on a clement Friday afternoon.
I had the impression of him, mistaken as it turns out, that he doesn’t like doing interviews. “People always say that,” he counters later when I bring it up. In the past he has admitted being interview-averse, slightly resentful that his job as an actor also involved having to open himself up for media scrutiny. He has spoken before about how being recognised used to bother him, but he seems more chilled about that now too. He says he mostly gets clocked for his role in Love/Hate – “Howiya John Boy” that kind of thing – but on Camden Street a while back, someone making deliveries saw him and said “there’s the man, Charlie” referencing his role in the television biopic of former taoiseach Charlie Haughey.
Over a nearly 40-year career that began with a Gerry Stembridge-directed part in Wanderly Wagon, Gillen has been in many famous roles on stage and particularly on screen: he shimmered as Stuart in Queer as Folk, had seven seasons playing Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish in the global pop culture phenomenon Game of Thrones, impressed as mercurial snaky politician Tommy Carcetti in The Wire and Frank Kinsella in Kin, not forgetting memorable parts in Peaky Blinders, The Mayor of Kingstown and Maze Runner. Many of the characters he has played have been described as charming psychopaths. In real life, he’s charming too, with an intriguing energy about him, a quality he brings to so many of those performances.
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In interview mode, he takes his time answering questions. You sense that he doesn’t want to give everything away, that he likes to retain a bit of mystery, but he’s open and friendly all the same. I tell him my sister watched him in The Lovers the other night on TG4, a 2017, New York-set movie of his I hadn’t seen before. He makes a non-committal face. It’s the same, mock-pained expression he makes when I mention some other things he’s been in. It’s an amusing display. Gillen has excellent comic timing in his day job and is naturally, darkly funny in person.
Taking the part in The Lovers was a no-brainer, he offers, because it meant getting a chance to work with Oscar-nominated Terms of Endearment and An Officer And a Gentleman star Debra Winger. The movie was made for “next to nothing” and he used whatever he was paid to fund his airfare to New York.
When I mention Pickups, one of three experimental films he has made with director Jamie Thraves, he gets more animated. He reckons The Low Down, the first film he made with Thraves for Film 4 in 2000, is “probably top three of all the stuff I’ve been involved with in my career, it’s a kind of a free and easy thing about a group of friends in London in their 20s. At the point in your life when you realise you are probably not going to get to do what you wanted to do.”
He made another low-budget film called Treacle Junior with Thraves. “It was quite well received,” he says. “Jamie remortgaged his house to get 25 grand to make it.”
Gillen played a character based on Aidan Walsh, the well-known arts impresario around Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s. Gillen, who grew up the youngest of six in Drumcondra, first encountered Walsh aged 10 in Gardiner Street church “where I was an altar boy once upon a time”. Treacle Junior might be one of Gillen’s greatest performances, the way he inhabits this loud-talking, disconcerting, optimistic Irish man in London. There’s a memorable scene in the movie where Gillen, channelling Walsh, is showing a new friend a pair of giant African snails called Slim and Shady that he keeps in a glass case in his grimy flat. “Do you want some snail babies?” he asks. The patter is relentlessly bizarre and Gillen is clearly enjoying himself.
Pickups is another difficult-to-pin-down piece of work in which he played an actor called Aidan. We’ve just finished talking about how that film featured a cameo by his partner, the singer, performer and writer Camille O’Sullivan, when his phone buzzes. It’s O’Sullivan wondering whether he might know the whereabouts of a blue suitcase full of items and costumes she needs for her gig tonight in the National Concert Hall. She’s singing Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel. She thinks she might have left the blue suitcase outside their house by accident. Gillen, clearly used to these sorts of calls on gig days, says he will check and consults his phone which affords him a CCTV view of the exterior of their home. “I will give you 500 quid if there’s a f***ing suitcase outside here,” he tells me, laughing as his eyes scan the screen. “Yeah, no suitcase.” He rings O’Sullivan to relay the news.
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Gillen feels the privilege and luck of not having been like those 20-something characters in The Low Down, who, on reaching their 20s, didn’t get to do what they wanted for a living. He was 14 when he followed the guy who lived across the road down to the Dublin Youth Theatre (DYT) premises on Gardiner Street.
“I spent a lot of time there, not just on Saturdays, because it was always open and there was a pool table so I’d be there playing pool and eating cream crackers.” Both DYT and later the National Youth Theatre were formative experiences. “It was an alternative to all the people I’d been hanging out with at school, or in my neighbourhood. There were people there from everywhere else.” A couple of years after he started in DYT he played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Project. “I got a few laughs and I knew then, that was the thing.”
He moved to London in his late teens, an untrained actor, knocking on doors, seeking out opportunities. He says he was never any good at auditions and can trace all his roles back to connections he made at home and in London. “Any of those early jobs I got was from, I’m not going to say hounding people, but I wasn’t sitting at home waiting for somebody to give me work.”
He’d been working for 12 years and was pushing 30 before he got his first big break in Queer As Folk, the groundbreaking drama by Russell T Davies. He had enough experience behind him by that stage to deal with the sudden fame and “to not be an idiot”.
He has always been led by his passion for performing. “It’s exhilarating,” he says of his craft. “It’s scary and it’s dangerous. It’s like flying or something. You are living vicariously through these characters, in these crazy, complicated real-life situations. And especially the way theatre or television or film is nowadays, It’s so naturalistic. It’s like you are living 20 lives, you know? It’s a bit of an addiction.”
While he’s not promoting anything major at the moment, Gillen has been busy and travelling a lot for work.He’s just back from a shooting a movie, Pojedynek, in Poland playing a man who ran a Soviet indoctrination camp in 1939. Last year, he wrapped a role in TRAD, a film by Lance Daly also starring Sarah Greene and his Love/Hate castmate Peter Coonan. It’s about a group of teenagers travelling around Ireland busking. He mentions filming with a young fiddle player from Donegal, a first-time actor, called Megan McGinley. The more seasoned actors were astonished by her. “Sarah and I just looked at each other ... these are the moments. Not hanging out with George Clooney. Watching teenagers who are first-time actors. You learn so much.” A few days after we meet he’s off to Hong Kong to work on two films, Cold War 94 and Cold War 95, set in the run up to the end of British rule in that part of the world.
The things I’m most proud of, nobody would have heard of them. But I’ve also loved being in those big things, Game of Thrones, The Wire. They were amazing times
He’s still in love with theatre. “The high wireness of it, the way you can’t think about anything else day or night.” It was like that for Faith Healer at the Abbey, a production a few years ago. “I wanted the challenge. And Joe Dowling, who directed the most famous productions of it, was directing and it was nice to be asked. Also, it’s an extraordinary f***ing play.”
For the last several years, having pooled their resources, Gillen and O’Sullivan have been renovating a “big old house in town” that was once a magnet for bohemian types like them. In the 1970s, writer and editor Patricia Avis and her poet husband Richard Murphy owned the top two floors and ran a salon there. Patrick Kavanagh, Brian O’Nolan and others were regular visitors.
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I read an interview where O’Sullivan said with the renovations nearly finished they were hoping to make it an “open house” for friends to come and do yoga and record music and be creative. Gillen makes that mock pained expression again. “I’ll definitely be trying to not have an open house and having Hello magazine sitting on the step,” he says. “But yeah we’re trying to reclaim a bit of the boho, get that spirit back in the house. We put our life savings into it. We know how lucky we are to have it.”
They first met on a car ferry they were both on due to cancelled flights caused by the Icelandic ash cloud 14 years ago. Later, when he was looking for a woman to play a female version of him in Pickups, he saw a poster of O’Sullivan and emailed to ask if she’d oblige. She did. After that, Gillen got O’Sullivan’s number surreptitiously from a call sheet when they both appeared on the bill at the same event.
Their first date was a sea swim in freezing cold water. And the rest is history, I suggest. “Histrionics,” he corrects and I imagine he’s talking as much about himself as O’Sullivan. He says he likes that there is mystery in the relationship and the fact that she’s from Cork. “I like Cork people ... also Camille is quite raw and vulnerable as a performer. That’s intriguing. We are probably similar in a lot of ways ... in the way we go about things. It goes from nought to sixty in terms of what we do, it can be exhilarating and speedy and dramatic.” He says they’ve talked about working together again. “We might do Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? some time.”
What work has he been proudest of? He mentions his Tony-nominated role in The Caretaker by Harold Pinter 20 years ago in New York, his roles in Mojo, both the play and the film and the previously mentioned Treacle Junior. “The things I’m most proud of, if I was to write them down, nobody would have heard of them. But I’ve also loved being in those big things, Game of Thrones, The Wire, all the rest of it. They were amazing times. They were just bigger than anything I had ever done. To be part of that [Game of Thrones] moment, well it wasn’t a moment, I was in it for seven years which was a very long f***ing moment.” He’s been in a lot of music videos too, his favourite being one for the Icelandic band Sigur Rós.
How does he feel about getting older? “There’s nothing you can do about ageing. I am 56 and I feel totally fine. I know that when I’m 66, if I get to 66, I am going to look at a picture of me when I am 56 and think ‘you looked so young’. As an actor it’s totally fine to look different than you did five years ago. I know how time works. It’s a f***ing arrow.”
“The time’s gone fast, that’s for sure. Kids have an interesting effect, time went faster and slower at the same time. A weird elasticity of time. I’m very glad I was lucky enough to have kids.” He has two grown-up children, a son and daughter, with his ex-wife, while O’Sullivan has a daughter with former partner Mike Scott of The Waterboys. Is there anything people might be surprised to know about him? “I have a train set,” he says. O’Sullivan bought it for him. It evokes powerful childhood memories of going to Sligo for holidays “that dirty, orange and black diesel train. Waiting for it to move off from the station. I can’t think of anything that made me happier, you know, not much”.
We walk through the park gates and say our goodbyes on the pavement outside. His phone pinged earlier with news that the blue suitcase had turned up. He goes off to get ready for O’Sullivan’s gig and possibly to help with the location of more props or costumes. I go home to google vintage Morrissey photos and watch the Sigur Ros music video Gillen said was his favourite. It features a mesmerising Gillen walking across forests and fields. There’s a talking snail on his shoulder. More snails. A bit more mystery. But then that’s Aidan Gillen for you.
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