Queer as Folk legend Aidan Gillen recalls controversial scenes – and why "fear of cancellation" means it wouldn't happen now

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

In a way, Aidan Gillen owes it all to punctuality and Pinter. Had he, 18 and fresh off the ferry from Ireland, not been told by a theatre director on his first job in London, “Never be late – ever”, years later he’d never have spent an hour on a movie set having breakfast with Harold Pinter. If he’d never had that breakfast, chances are that he’d never have made his Broadway debut in Pinter’s The Caretaker with a performance that The New York Times called “smashing”.

If he’d never got that part, he’d never have been seen by a producer of The Wire who offered him the part of ambitious politician Tommy Carcetti in what’s widely recognised as the greatest TV drama ever made. And without that, the creators of Game of Thrones would never have thought of him for the conniving Littlefinger Baelish in what was, in its time, the biggest TV show in the world. The fame it brought him, nine years after the series ended, is “ongoing”. The breakfast of champions, it would seem from Gillen’s impressive ascent, is black coffee and a Mars bar.

When we meet, I want to trace Gillen’s through-line, but he eyes my recorder with suspicion. “Which end is the mic on?” he asks, before revealing that he secretly records his mother on his phone sometimes. “She’s old and records a lot of her own stuff anyway,” he says by way of explanation. “I mean, I don’t really want to talk about my mother…”

Our conversation will, it turns out, be full of such curious tangents. It will also have its share of silence as Gillen sometimes stops mid-sentence if he can’t quite find precisely the word he needs to make his point.

But back to his trajectory. Did he always want to be an actor? “As a career, it seemed pretty unlikely,” he says. “It was more something I was doing at youth theatre. I found a lot of interesting people through the group and that was all it was about. Hanging out on a Saturday and a Wednesday and a Tuesday.”

Then, at 15, he played Francis Flute in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – “one of the greatest character names ever” – in a proper theatre in Dublin, and got a laugh. “It’s a cliché to say you get bitten by the bug,” he says, “but I thought, ‘Right, I can do this.’” With professional theatre in Ireland “thin on the ground” at the time, in the mid-1980s, he hustled, tracking down directors’ phone numbers and getting paid “60 quid here and there” for small parts.

At 18, a part in a play brought him to London. His mother was, he says deadpan, delighted. “One more kid out of the house.” Gillen is one of six siblings.

Arriving in London was quite the culture shock. “My idea of the city was assembled from Dickens and the Blitz. It was Oliver Twist and bombed-out streets, searchlights and bombers overhead, all mixed in with Fagin and Bill Sikes and Arthur Daley. Then I got off the Tube at Bond Street, and I thought, ‘F**king hell. There’s a lot more money here than I thought.’ None of which I had, of course. But I was good at bunking on trains.”

He was also good at making in-roads in TV and theatre, from the BBC to the National. Being, as he puts it, “exotic and untrained” turned out to be an asset rather than a handicap. He learnt the craft on the job and that training began in earnest at the Bush Theatre, where a Scottish director set out the terms of employment.

“The deal was, you’re in a tiny box, the audience are two feet away, so you can’t fake anything. If you do it right, it’ll be appreciated. If you don’t do it right, it’ll be noticed. And don’t be late – ever. It was intense and fantastic.”

And Gillen took it to heart. He was early for our interview and, in 1997, when Gillen turned up for the first days of filming Mojo – the screen version of Jez Butterworth’s 1995 play in which he also appeared – he was early. So, as it happened, was Harold Pinter, who was playing the villain of the piece. Only ever mentioned in the play, Sam Ross actually appeared in the film.

“We were in the café for like an hour before everyone else and I remember sitting there with my breakfast of a Mars bar and a black coffee, and Pinter was wearing socks that looked like stockings, thin silk. He was kinda exactly what you might expect and we had a perfectly stilted conversation.”

Pinteresque. At least initially. “He started off as an actor and he told me about his early days. We spoke about [Irish author] Edna O’Brien, who he was very friendly with. It wasn’t that stilted in the end. It was just stuff I wasn’t quite expecting coming at me.”

The two had only one scene together – “I think he asked me a question and I rang a bell on a bike in reply” – but it was enough. When David Jones, directing The Caretaker in New York, asked Pinter if he thought Gillen was the man for the job, Pinter said yes. Gillen says he’s read somewhere that Pinter’s exact words were “Well, he won’t say anything,” which, in the Pinter canon, could equally be a line of dialogue, a character reference or a stage direction. “So there is a through-line,” he says.

The line continued in New York where, during the run of The Caretaker, a producer of The Wire spotted him and offered him Carcetti, an ambitious Baltimore councilman. The show was written episode by episode, so nobody knew where the character was going.

Playing him over 35 episodes was, Gillen says, “more akin to walking on air” than hard work. He moved into the kind of neighbourhood Carcetti might live in and took advice from Bill Zorzi, a Baltimore Sun political reporter who wrote for the show. “The fact they had that amount of time to tell the story meant the changes could be incremental.”

Game of Thrones, Gillen says, “came directly from The Wire”. David Benioff and DB Weiss told him they saw something of Carcetti in Littlefinger. Nobody, he reckons, foresaw its scale.

“It seemed like a niche world. I thought Dungeons and Dragons people would watch this, but it was them plus everybody else.” And when the TV series overtook George RR Martin’s original novels, nobody knew Littlefinger’s fate, which suited him. “If you know the end, you tend to play against it or towards it. Both are giveaways.”

The characters on his through-line are, I suggest, of a type – clever, charismatic, compromised. His steer on Littlefinger came from Martin’s first line introducing him: charming, duplicitous, “with a glint in his eye” and he says he always tries to make the villains he plays “likeable and intriguing”.

Gillen also says that he knows his limits. “The clever thing is to work within them, and they shift as you do more. You push right to the edge of what they might be. Sometimes you step over the line and discover you can do that. Sometimes you discover you can’t.” It’s also how he knows when to say no.

“I can tell when I’m not the right person,” he says, and has recommended other actors for roles he’s turned down.

And so to the clever, charismatic and compromised Stuart Alan Jones in Queer as Folk, for many TV viewers their first sight of Gillen and, for the purposes of this article, his breakthrough “Yes and no,” he says. “But let’s say yes for now.” Did he have reservations as a straight man about playing a gay character when the script landed? “That wasn’t a factor,” he says. “I saw a quite explosive character, so clever and so different, so provocative. I don’t think someone’s sexual preferences define them. It’s part of the picture. But I could see it was groundbreaking and new.”

It was so groundbreaking in 1999 that Gillen suspects that they wouldn’t make Queer as Folk now, certainly not with a relationship between a man in his early 30s and a 15-year-old boy at its heart. “Obviously, the whole thing with Stuart and Nathan was tricky, remains tricky, and I was aware of its trickiness at the time.” But television, he says, has become timid. “There’s a lot of things they’re afraid to do now. There’s this fear of cancellation and everything else. They just wouldn’t do it now.”

His performance, meanwhile, was, he thinks, bolder than anyone expected. Russell T Davies, he’s read, expected a different Stuart. “I gave them a different kind of performance. I had this whole internal life imagined and I think Russell was surprised by it, but they ended up editing a lot of it in. I don’t think they knew entirely what I was up to at the time.”

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There’s a certain amount of subterfuge to his latest role, in Tall Tales & Murder, in which he plays the enigmatic Grinner, who spends most of the first episode in a coma. Acting unconscious must be harder than it looks, no? “No,” grins Gillen. “You can just lie there. The trick is not falling asleep.”

Rest assured that Gillen doesn’t lie down for long. If nothing else, his trajectory won’t accommodate it. Indeed, it’s his awakening that kicks the action of Tall Tales & Murder into a higher gear and sets Ella Lily Hyland’s Bridget and Casey Walsh’s Paul on a life-changing journey.

To finish, I ask Gillen what he’s working on now. It turns out he has joined the cast of Amazon’s Young Sherlock, playing the mentor and sometime tormentor of Moriarty. Of course he is. That through-line continues…

Tall Tales and Murder begins on 3 November on BBC One and iPlayer.

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