Aidan Gillen

Aidan Gillen
Aidan Gillenis an Irish actor. He is best known for portraying Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish in the HBO series Game of Thrones, Tommy Carcetti in the HBO series The Wire, CIA operative Bill Wilson in The Dark Knight Rises, Stuart Alan Jones in the Channel 4 series Queer as Folk, and John Boy in the RTÉ Television series Love/Hate...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth24 April 1968
CityDublin, Ireland
CountryIreland
It's always more interesting to take on someone that's going to have hidden sides or a fatal flaw, because there's going to be more to play with - more conflict, internally or in and around them - but it's probably the thing of finding the positive in there.
I do what I can, but I'll always give it a shot. You're not going to see me playing a Welsh character any time soon, not because I wouldn't love to. I went up to Wales once and read for a film with Rhys Ifans, and haven't been asked back since. We did have a nice time on the train on the way back.
I don't do a lot of reflecting. I'm usually about getting on with it.
I heat myself up over the fact that I am never going to be as good as I want to be.
I like the Edinburgh Film Festival, and I've liked what I've experienced of Glasgow's Film Festival too.
'You're Ugly Too' isn't a comedy, but it has a lightness of touch with a hard edge. But it's essentially a warm story tinged with a bit of melancholy in the great Irish tradition. I'm very proud of that film.
Everything's borne out of human experience, of course - rejection, humiliation, poverty, whatever. People aren't born bad, no matter how harsh the circumstances. There is a person in there, and that person is not made of ice.
Both 'The Wire' and 'Queer as Folk' had a big scope. They were panoramas, telling ambitious stories about two cities, Baltimore and Manchester, for the first time.
There's no way the writing staff of 'Game of Thrones' haven't read 'The Art of War.' There's definitely an influence on 'Game of Thrones' from this book in both a general way and on the character of Lord Baelish and his strategies.
There's a lot of 'Game of Thrones' stuff used in a lot of pastiches. I don't know if I've seen a Lego 'Game of Thrones' yet, but there must be one. And there's an animated thing that's been going on for quite some time, and Littlefinger is a newsreader in it, and it's great.
My own rapping skills are quite good, actually. You get this thing, I think it's called Songify or AutoRap, and you talk into them, and they auto-tune it and make it into a quite interesting musical number. And I got one where it builds it into a rap.
Becoming a father has made my life a lot more interesting. It's like everything slows down because time goes slower, and you notice that you're actually awake for so many more hours. Your waking hours elongate because you're doing things at a child's pace.
Because work takes up a lot of time, you have to choose your moments for really letting rip. I hang out with my friends and my family and I spend time with my kids when I'm not working. They don't see my being an actor as exotic. For them, it's just an everyday thing. Sometimes it's amusing to them and other times, embarrassing.
So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale's work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were 'Screen Twos' produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke.