In new movies Barber and Dance First, Aidan Gillen reveals his less villainous side
The Irish actor has a natural impishness so disarming that we often do not see what is coming in his choice of on-screen characters. His latest roles see him take a surprising turn.
Aidan Gillen has a natural impishness so disarming that we often do not see what is coming in his choice of on-screen characters.
The Irish actor became a fan favourite as the cunning Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish in Game of Thrones. His cast of villains includes Tommy Carcetti, the venal Baltimore politician, mayor and then governor of Maryland in The Wire.
He was the main antagonist in two Maze Runner movies and has an ongoing role as the Russian mobster kingpin in Mayor of Kingstown. He also played Romany hit man for hire Aberama Gold, in two seasons of Peaky Blinders and he had a leading role in the recent Irish crime series Kin.
Gillen’s latest ventures show him in a different light again. We meet at the Dinard Festival du film Britannique in France where he is showing his new film, Barber, in which he plays a scruffy Dublin detective. And, in another surprising turn, he plays James Joyce in Dance First, a biopic about Samuel Beckett, that is screening in the Cunard British Film Festival around Australia next month.
Gillen appears early in the film where Joyce takes the young Beckett (Fionn O’Shea) under his wing. Gabriel Byrne plays the older Beckett when he has become a famous playwright, and is also the story’s narrator.
Gillen, 55, points out that Beckett worked as a secretary for Joyce in Paris in his early years.
“I wouldn’t say there’s a clear influence from Joyce to Beckett,” he says. “Sparks fly between them, but his advice to Beckett was more to write in his own way, which they both did.
“Both changed the landscape of literature. I’ve been connected to a different James Joyce biopic for a long time, which is very much about Joyce in his later years and his daughter Lucia, who is a prominent character in Dance First.”
Gillen has some form with James Joyce, having performed a reading of his short story The Dead on stage with live music in London and Dublin.
“I wouldn’t say it’s an impersonation,” Gillen says of his performance as Joyce. “I don’t think Gabriel was obsessed about it being a direct impersonation (of Beckett) either, because at the end of the day it’s not a birth-to-death biopic. It’s chapters of Beckett’s life.”
Shot in Budapest (standing in for Paris), Dance First was directed by James Marsh, the Oscar-winning director of Man on Wire, the Stephen Hawking story The Theory of Everything and Shadow Dancer in which Gillen appeared alongside Andrea Riseborough.
“His directing here is at … the more austere, black-and-white, semi-silent side of things,” Gillen says. “James presents his thoughtfulness in a way that you can see it, and you’re not going to see that in a superhero film.”
Of course, Gillen played a CIA operative in The Dark Knight Rises – a role he said he took to please his kids.
Gillen is soft-spoken and it comes across in his subtle way of acting.
“Sometimes the role is close to you, so why do too much?” he says. “Though, sometimes, you need to do quite a lot. A lot of my favourite actors don’t seem to be doing too much.
“If I could pick what I consider a perfect performance in a perfect production it would be Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective. Knowing that kind of stuff was made for television was one of the things that definitely made me want to pursue this career.”
The landmark series was made when there were fewer prestige productions for the small screen than there are now.
“But the money was there at the BBC,” Gillen says. “All my first non-theatre gigs were for the BBC, like Antonia Bird’s 1993 film Safe. That was a big break, but also a real eye-opener for me in terms of how to go about things.
“There was a more experienced actress in it called Kate Hardie, who gave me loads of pointers on what to do and what not to do. It was breaking rules, basically, or perceived rules. Safe has rough edges like a lot of my favourite music and films. And I still go for that.”
Gillen is the youngest of six children. Did he feel he had to make his mark?
“Not by the time I came along, there was no point,” he says. “I just wanted to disappear, not for any dark reason – I just didn’t need to do anything. There was plenty of stuff going on. It was a nice upbringing in a nice house in the middle of Dublin. I got on well with all my siblings.”
He learnt the ropes in the theatre, initially in a local troupe with his sister and a friend when he was in his early teens.
“I grew to love it and realised these were the kinds of people I wanted to spend the rest of my life with,” he says. “But at 17 I knew I had to get out of there.”
At 18 he moved to London and worked across stage, TV and film. He appeared in Circle of Friends and Some Mother’s Son before gaining wide attention as a charming sociopath in Channel 4’s groundbreaking Queer as Folk in 1999.
After 20 years in London he returned to Ireland, initially living in Dingle in County Kerry with his then wife, actor Olivia O’Flanagan, with whom he has a daughter, Berry, 19, and a son, Joe, 16.
He now lives in Dublin with Irish singer, actor and cabaret performer Camille O’Sullivan, who has a role alongside him in Barber. She has performed several times in Australia and includes Nick Cave songs in her repertoire. Gillen sang a rendition of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams with her for Irish television in 2019.
“Acting with Camille was as much about getting around Covid restrictions as anything,” he says. “We just got out of bed and rolled in. But we’d acted together before. I actually met her on a film called Pickups, directed by my friend Jamie Thraves who I’ve made four things with and Barber was again on the lo-fi end of the scale.”
He made Barber with a bunch of his friends, with the exception of stunning newcomer Aisling Kearns, who plays his daughter as we follow Barber on the case of a missing girl.
Gillen wore his own clothes to play Barber and says, in many ways, the character is similar to himself. “It was born out of us walking around with a camera in Dublin – ‘Where are we going to go?’ ” he says. “I just walked into a particular bar and it was interesting because the director, Fintan Connolly, wasn’t expecting me to do that. So maybe this is where Barber goes at night. He’s got this other life that people don’t know about.”
Mystery was also at the heart of Littlefinger in Game of Thrones, even if the character was killed off before the final season. Just don’t say he was killed off to Gillen.
“I don’t like the phrase killed off,” he says. “I prefer killed. Killed off implies that you were sacked – it’s a whole different vibe.”
He was in Game of Thrones for seven years until the penultimate season and says he loved being in the fantasy series for as long as he was. “I was happy about what I was doing and I was doing exactly what I wanted to do,” he says.
“Importantly, I looked exactly how I wanted to look. I had very strong ideas about costume, hair, all that stuff. You’ve got to convince people of your look. So once I had that going on, the advice I got from Kate Hardie (on 1993 film Safe) really came into play when we were revoicing or reworking a section. That chaos became emblematic of Littlefinger and it was very different than we did on the day. I just went much bigger. I completely changed it and that changed the route of my character and the way people wrote for him.”
Last year Gillen, who was nominated for a Tony when he appeared on Broadway in The Caretaker in 2004, returned to the stage in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer at the Abbey in Dublin.
“I hadn’t done it for ages, and that was tough enough in terms of learning and performance and the stamina and nerve that you need to do it,” he says.
“You reboot a little in your head which means you’re right back to where you started, which is like walking a tightrope. It’s not Albuquerque, you know, with a nice car with tinted windows driving you to work and you get paid for just saying a few lines. It’s like the opposite. So that was good.
“And that was an intentional move, to make things difficult.”
The Albuquerque-shot films he mentions are the Maze Runner films and 2021’s Those Who Wish Me Dead, starring Angelina Jolie and directed by Taylor Sheridan. Sheridan is quite the director-creator of the moment because of the series Yellowstone, 1883, 1923, Special Ops: Lioness (starring Nicole Kidman) and Mayor of Kingstown.
Gillen is waiting for the actors’ strike to be over so filming on Mayor of Kingstown can resume. The series’ injured star Jeremy Renner is OK? “He’s ready to go apparently,” Gillen says.
Gillen has been to Australia only once, when he was promoting his starring role in Disney series Project Blue Book. At one point he was to come here to make a Ned Kelly film, Fanatic Heart, with director Michael Jenkins. That project did not go ahead, but Gillen would still love to work here.
“I’ve always had a real fondness for Australian films,” he says. “Peter Weir is one my favourite directors, not just because he’s Australian but because there’s so much variety in the stuff he’s done. It’s all great, from Master and Commander to Picnic at Hanging Rock to Fearless to The Truman Show.”
There aren’t many people around like that any more, I suggest.
“No,” Gillen agrees. “People are just expecting you to do the same thing. It’s like the stuff John Huston used to do – just different, you know? Proper filmmakers.”
Dance First is screening as part of the Cunard British Film Festival in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Byron Bay and Canberra through November.
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