INTERVIEW
on the flaws. It’s a bit of everything, but some of yourself has to come through as well. If you’re cast as a real person, there has to be a vague likeness. You do what you can to wrap it up a little, so you bring your own imagination and personality to bear on it.” The union of imagination and personality is the difference between mesmerising and mediocre, and it is this blend that has turned Aidan Gillen from an aspiring 17-year-old actor to a fully established one more than 30 years later. His training ground, so to speak, was on Dublin’s Northside – Dublin Youth Theatre, the location of which was a few minutes’ stroll from his family home in Drumcondra. His career proper began after he left school, when he was cast in a Project Theatre
production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He got his Equity card (signed by Irish actor Niall Tóibín) and he was on his way. Well, almost. After a sequence of minor (sometimes less than) movie roles and slightly more significant theatre work, he moved from Dublin to London, and from the early 1990s Gillen’s career puzzle started to fit together. More film work (1996’s Some Mother’s Son, 1997’s Mojo) and several low-key UK television appearances (including The Bill) preceded his breakout role in the controversial 1999 UK drama, Queer as Folk. From there, a slow but steady series of acting roles reinforced Gillen’s ability to burrow his way into a character. Count the successes: The Wire (2004-2008), Love/Hate (2010-
Boxing clever – Aidan Gillen stars in the new series of Peaky Blinders, playing Aberama Gold, who forms an uneasy alliance with Thomas Shelby, played by Cillian Murphy.
“They tend not to make dramas about people who aren’t flawed” 42 |
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2013), Charlie (2015) and Game of Thrones (2011-2017). To that venerable list you can add another quality television series: Peaky Blinders. His inclusion in that, he says, came about via a simple mode of communication. “I got a phone call! The person behind the series, Steven Knight, said he had written a new character, and did I want to play it? I said yes – very simple. There was a little bit of discussion about where my character was going to go, how it would develop, but I know that I’ll also be in season five.” Introduced in the current season four, he is playing an Irish-Romani hard-nut by the name of Aberama Gold. A smile lights up his face. “How could you not play someone by that name?” Once more, he emphasises, character traits – voice, deportment, style – came from research: reading about horse fairs, conversations with Irish actor/writer John Connors and reading George Borrow’s 1857 novel, The Romany