Aidan Gillen, whom the most of us know from Game of Thrones or The Wire, served as a judge in this year’s TIFF jury panel. He had a busy schedule: between attending screenings and meeting the public, we had very little time to interview him. During our attempts to present him with as many of our questions as possible, he took out his phone and showed us all the photographs he took of all the churches he’s been to. Thus the interview took an unexpected turn… towards the question of faith.
You were born Aidan Murphy, and you took your mother’s maiden name, Gillen, when you arrived in London. Was that just a Screen Actors Guild technicality?
It seemed appropriate to take my mother’s name. Another actor who was with us on the same show, Gary O’Brien, had to change his name too, so we decided we should both take our mothers’ maiden names. We had to do it — but it also gave us a little bit of: okay, we’re somebody else now. It was interesting.
You started acting at 14, in a youth theatre. What was that first real experience?
I’d done four or five plays by that point. But it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when I was 15 — I played Flute, one of the mechanicals, in the play-within-the-play — where I got laughs. I got laughs, and I thought: okay, I’m doing it right. You could tell, because the laughter came, which I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t even know what an audience reaction was — I’d never been in front of an audience before. It was quite intoxicating, and affirming. I found something I could do, and I decided right then, that’s what I’m doing.
Were you attracted to acting because of the attention?
I loved doing it — but the fact that I got the reaction meant I must have been doing it right. I thought: here’s something I can do. Because there wasn’t much else.
Was there ever anything else that attracted you as much as acting?
There were the usual jobs you take to make ends meet in between — sticking things in letterboxes, dressing up as an alien in a supermarket, building sites. Just stuff. But no real alternative calling, no.
You played in some bands. Did you ever wish for more from that?
I never actually played in a proper band — I wished I had. I have plenty of friends who were in bands, who still are. But I’m glad I took the route I did. The band life doesn’t go on forever for a lot of people — or you end up playing the same things over and over. With acting, it’s more interesting: you’re diverse, and other people do the writing. I’m not a writer. I still love music, but this suits me better.
In Gorky Resort, you play the piano. Did you take lessons for it?
Not really — yes and no. I don’t want to demystify it entirely, but of course, that’s somebody else actually playing. What I did do was watch a friend of mine, Fergal, who’s a pianist, just to study his stance. I knew there’d be maybe one or two scenes, and that the shot would likely be wide. So I watched him from a distance: how do you sit? Because the temptation is to go full Amadeus — whereas classically, there’s very little movement. You can be passionate without throwing yourself at it. And this man — my character — was reserved. He’s not Mozart. The other character, he was the passionate one...
Can you describe the difference between acting on stage and acting in front of a camera?
With the camera, it’s framed — you can be as daring as you want, every day. It doesn’t matter if you mess it up; that’s actually good, that’s attractive. You can do that in theatre too, but there it does matter if you mess it up. Theatre is much harder — much more of a psychic toll.
I don’t do much theatre now. The last sustained role I did was about twelve years ago: two David Mamet plays back to back, American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross. Then I didn’t act on stage again until about three years ago, because I wasn’t sure I even wanted to. When I finally decided to go back, I told myself: wait until the hardest, most taxing thing comes along. And it was this Brian Friel play, Faith Healer — an Irish modern classic from 1979, first done in New York. Four monologues, three characters, structured a bit like Kurosawa’s Rashomon — people telling the same story from different perspectives. Very tricky. I was literally in the dressing room before each show, head in my hands, asking myself why I was doing this. But you’ve got to be able to do it.
On camera you catch such nuance — the glitter of an eye, a tiny movement. You don’t have the live energy of an audience, but you have something else.
They’re different, and both have something irreplaceable. I don’t know if I’ll do another theatre show. It’s that thing: terrifying and exhilarating at once, depending on what you’re doing and how prepared you are. I’m not a trained actor — there’s no formal technique, it’s something I’ve assembled myself. What I aspire to on screen is to do nothing — think it all through in preparation, then forget about it and just be there. I’m always still learning that.
But the exhilaration of walking down the street after a theatre show — you’re not going to get that from film. It happened, it’s done, it belongs to no one — if you were there, you were there, and if you weren’t, you weren’t. On stage you can’t phone it in. You really have to be on it. People who know me well have told me I’m much better on stage than on screen.
Oh, then it will be on my bucket list to see You on stage one day...
I take that as a huge compliment, because I wasn’t sure. I do think of the stage as a tightrope walk — it literally feels like that. And if you fall, of course it’s okay, but when you’re doing it, a mistake feels worse than death. That’s genuinely what it feels like.
I believe any mistake on stage can be repaired — your fellow actors can help, for example. But not when you’re alone up there.
Exactly — like in Faith Healer, where you’re entirely on your own. But the preparation can make it almost failsafe: if the script is beaten in like a nail, it’s so deeply there that it holds. And mistakes are actually interesting. When something goes wrong in a scene you’re filming and someone gets it wrong, it becomes more spontaneous. In a theatre, when something goes wrong, it suddenly becomes more alive. Mistakes are where it’s at. You ride through them — it’s like a boat through waves, you bash through and things move a little differently each time.
Tell us about the actors and directors who influenced you most.
They tended to be older — much older than I was. The ones I was watching at 20 were 50 or whatever. Among the Irish: Donal McCann, a brilliant stage actor, probably known internationally for the adaptation of Joyce’s The Dead — John Huston’s final film. A masterpiece. I’ve also performed that story myself, in a candlelit rehearsed reading at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. And Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective — the late-’80s television series — was a revelation.
Then the obvious ones that every actor of my generation loves: De Niro, Pacino, Meryl Streep, Sean Penn. Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke were the two I was most obsessed with at 15, 16, 17. That’s when I really locked in.
Tell us about being part of the jury here, at Transilvania International Film Festival — did you know the festival before, and had you been to Romania before?
I didn’t know the festival, but the invitation came through the woman who runs the Dublin Film Festival. She’d been here a few times and said: this is coming your way, I recommend it. I love going to film festivals — so many of the projects I’m proudest of had their lives determined by festival exposure, whether that meant distribution or simply being seen. And I love going to new places, meeting people, exploring different film cultures. I hadn’t been to Romania before, and I’ve had a really good time so far — about four days in. I take the jury responsibilities seriously, because I know what it means to get recognition, or not get it. And the particular group of people I’m here with are exceptional at what they do.
Getting to see films for the first or second time they’ve ever been screened — that’s exciting. But also just walking the streets of a new place and watching people — which is what I do. I take notes on how people move, what they’re wearing. I’ve got photographs of buildings all over town, photographs of clothes, of haircuts. The album is growing.
Do you visit the churches too? I spotted you yesterday in front of a Catholic church. Was that accidental?
I do like churches. I’ve been in several here, actually. I grew up Catholic — all the usual: communion, confirmation. I don’t have an active faith now. I understand it, I don’t disrespect it — I understand why people need it — but I’m more of a scientific, logical mindset. Not that I claim to know the be-all and end-all of anything. I just find churches fascinating as places.
I was in one of the Orthodox churches — a very old one in the city centre, currently under repair, scaffold on the inside. I thought the scaffold was part of the structure at first. But what struck me was the people inside: very solemn, very serious. I’m a lapsed Catholic. In Ireland, wherever you’re from, it’s imposed upon you. I was an altar boy. I spent enough time around churches to eventually make up my own mind. And what I’ve noticed here is that faith keeps coming up in conversations — the woman who’s been showing me around has a short film in the festival about losing her faith, someone else told me he got into cinema because he had questions about God. It’s always of interest to me, even if I’m not practising anything myself. Other than, as I say — I love life.
I try to live a good life and be good to people. Most of the real ethos of faith — looking after each other, looking out for each other — I do that anyway. I’m just not interested in the rituals.
Do you think faith, religion, or the Church is ever truly taboo in cinema? Even old traditions that modern society struggles with — some people feel they must hold onto them precisely because they’re theirs.
Faith Healer — the play I mentioned — was entirely about this. A man who goes around old halls for thirty years, healing people. Is it bogus, is it real? It’s about the nature of faith, and how people’s willingness to believe can be abused. Sometimes the inspiration was there, sometimes it wasn’t — and that ambiguity is what made it so rich.
I was also in an Irish film called Calvary — probably one of the more interesting things done about faith on screen. Brendan Gleeson plays a priest questioning everything. It’s definitely in the Irish psyche. The Church went from being almost all-powerful to its exact opposite in a matter of years — to do with the scandals, but also timing. Pope John Paul came to Ireland, a million people showed up in the fields, including me. And within three years, it had all turned. The priests, the nuns — the whole institution needs to modernise. I probably shouldn’t be going on about all this [laughs]. Please watch Calvary if you have the opportunity.
