The Independent:
The Wild One [Aidan Gillen]
9/1/01
"Well, I mean, we're only halfway through rehearsals so I haven't found the character yet...I mean, personally, I wouldn't want to start on the first day knowing about, I mean, I wouldn't, I mean, I never seem to do that...I haven't got a complete grasp so...[sighs]...look, my character, he's not easy to pin down, you know, he's changing his tack all the time, he's just not easily defined I don't think...now...why is that?"
Actor Aidan Gillen is not one for soundbites, off-the-cuff glibness, or even complete sentences. Everything he says in his soft Dublin accent is thoughtfully, diffidently delivered. Seconds segue into minutes as he turns over the implications of the most mundane of enquiries before delivering an answer. Any attempt to chivvy him along or proffer suggestions is met with a flash of his dark brown eyes and a gentle reprimand of the "as I was trying to say..." variety. The mental turmoil that seems to be his lot has a physical expression too. His sallow features contort, his slight but muscular frame tenses in his chair, and he has a habit of nervously rubbing at the skin on his neck and toned midriff. The latter he casually reveals from beneath a skimpy T-shirt that wouldn't look out of place on a 16-year-old, rather than someone twice that age.
Gillen, who found overnight success two years ago as Stuart, the hedonistic heart-breaker and absentee father in the controversial Queer as Folk, is talking about his latest, theatrical outing, taking the lead in a new adaptation by David Hare of a nearly, rarely performed Chekhov play called Platonov. It is lunchtime (which for Gillen means a single, anaemic Tesco's wrap) and we are wedged almost knee to knee in a cramped, stuffy office attached to the rehearsals rooms in Bromley-by-Bow in east London.
Platonov is just one in a string of top roles that have come Gillen's way in the wake of his Channel 4 breakthrough. At Christmas he was back on TV screens as another engaging rogue, Carver, in the BBC's seasonal costume drama Lorna Doone, giving a performance described in this newspaper as "magnetic". A couple of months after that he was winning more rave reviews ("rivetingly nervy", "compelling") and picking up the Pathe Best Newcomer prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival for his portrayal of troubled slacker Frank in director Jamie Thraves' stunning debut The Low Down.
Gillen has also just finished shooting My Kingdom, a reworking of King Lear set in modern-day Liverpool with Richard Harris in the title role, and The Final Curtain in which he goes head to head with another Irish acting legend, Peter O'Toole, in a TV ratings battle between rival gameshow hosts. Oh, and he's just got married to his long-term partner Olivia (no, he's not gay), and they've just had their second child, Joe, a brother for three-year-old daughter Berry. Perhaps Gillen's prolix interview style is not after all arty introspection, but simply an effect of nervous exhaustion and sleepless nights?
"Yeah, I do help with Olivia, bringing up the kids, as much as possible, but obviously it mainly falls on her, and it is really, really hard work." And acting commitments? "Yeah, I suppose I've been busy all the time," he says. "It's not, like, been crazily different to before Queer as Folk, and the kind of things that I'm doing are still the same as I used to, I haven't suddenly been offered loads of parts of guys who sleep with everyone. But it is different now, I can just get offered a part without having to read for it, because I'm crap at auditioning, so that's a bonus for me."
As if to prove the latter point, the title role in Platonov, which shortly begins a 10-week run at the Almeida Theatre, was suggested to him during a chance encounter in a bar with director Jonathan Kent, "although I'm sure they would have asked meanyway, although maybe not [troubled frown], maybe someone else might have walked in and they'd have offered it them?" In truth Gillen has quite a pedigree at the north London theatre. Most recently, at the end of last year, he gave an extraordinarily acrobatic and subaquatic performance as Ariel in The Tempest. When not delivering verse dangling upside-down from a trapeze, he was required to make his entrances and exits via a pool which had been sunk through the floor of the stage. "I don't think it was as hard as it looked," he insists, modestly. "OK, physically it was tiring, but it was a gift for an actor."
In Platonov, Gillen takes the part of a disillusioned schoolteacher in a small provincial community where he is the catalyst for a series of comic and tragic events. And, despite Gillen's earlier assertion about the roles he now gets offered, this character at least does have something in common with bad-boy Stuart from Queer as Folk. Platonov breaks the hearts of no less than four characters in the play, from his wife Sasha, played by Jodhi May (Gillian Anderson's embittered cousin in The House of Mirth), to widow Anna, played by Helen McCrory (last year's Anna Karenina, on Channel 4).
"Yeah, women are the only thing that excite Platonov any more, but he refuses to take any responsibility for what he's doing to these women, which is what leads to his undoing." Aidan, according to Jonathan Kent, was perfect for the part, because, he says, he "didn't want anything kempt, and he's got a sort of darkness, a celtic wildness".
Kent's observation is telling. While Gillen himself says he is aware of the risks of being typecast as an "Irish rogue" and has turned down parts to avoid being pigeonholed, he admits such roles have, as now, served him well. It was in one of the best Irish plays of the past generation that he got his big break, in Billy Roche's A Handful of Stars at the Bush Theatre in London. Gillen was a mere 18 at the time. The youngest of six (architect father, nurse mother), he had previously been a member of the Dublin Youth Theatre, mainly, he claims, as a way of meeting girls. Indeed, it was then, aged 15, that he met Olivia.
In the wake of A Handful of Stars, Gillen notched up a succession of good supporting roles, including stints at the Royal Court and National Theatres in London, and big-screen performances as the disturbed Baby in Jez Butterworth's Mojo and the hunger-striker Gerard in Some Mother's Son, opposite Helen Mirren. But it was Queer as Folk, the exuberant, ground-breaking story of a group of friends revolving around Manchester's gay village, that really established him. It wasn't just a case of notoriety, although the programme did notch up an impressive 163 complaints after the first episode, in which his character picked up a 15-year-old schoolboy and gave him, and the nation, an unforgettable lesson in gay sex.
Queer as Folk was also, generally, a critical success. Even Lynda Lee-Potter in the Daily Mail, while opining that "the physical gyrations of naked bodies [will] almost certainly catapult other young men into the gay world", had to admit that Gillen had "star quality". Asking Gillen about the furor now, one senses that he is wary of dwelling on it. Perhaps, like Irishness, it's not something he wants to get too associated with? "Was there hysteria...? Were there complaints...? Actually, I thought everyone...Oh, I don't know, I wasn't around when it came out, I was in America, I think...I managed to miss all that..."
Safer perhaps, then, given that afternoon rehearsals are fast approaching and Gillen's answers are not getting any conciser, to move on to his two major new big-screen projects. In My Kingdom, an updated King Lear, Gillen plays a policeman who's in love with one of the daughters of crime boss (the Lear character) Richard Harris.
Gillen's part appears to correspond to Edmund in Shakespeare's original. "I don't know," he says, disarmingly free of Bard luvviness, "it's a loose adaptation, and I've never read King Lear, so I find it difficult to talk about the character I play, but he's a bit dodgy, morally a bit dubious, he mixes with the people he's supposed to be investigating." Gillen does recount with a certain glee a night on the tiles with Harris while filming. "I was amazed how famous Harris is," he says. "We just went out to some pub and people were coming up to him all the time and getting him to sign pounds 10 notes, and he loved it. I thought he was cool."
No such shenanigans with Harris's former drinking pal Peter O'Toole, who plays the "Bob Monkhouse-Bruce Forsythe type" gameshow host to Gillen's upstart rival in The Final Curtain, a black comedy from the pen of John "Trainspotting" Hodge. "It's kind of like a Tom & Jerry relationship, it's a fantasy," says Gillen. "Peter was very charming and gentle to work with," he adds. "He's a very generous-spirited guy and very young at heart, although, physically...his skin is like, translucent."
And does he see himself in his compatriots' shoes in 40 years' time, or even more successful, looking back on an illustrious A-list film career? "Fuck, definitely not...Forty? It's actually a good bit less than that...fuck, I'd be doing well. No, I would have wanted that, five or 10 years ago, but I don't know how much there is in it really. It's like, when you're first in something and your name's printed on the ad it's great, but that excitement fades after a while, and I'm not sure I'd want to do the whole Hollywood thing and hang around out there, waiting with 20,000 others."
"The other thing is," he adds, scotching once and for all any similarity with his self-absorbed and bachelor personas from stage and screen, "it's not really fair when you've got two kids, especially as they' re getting older. When I go on location the family goes too, and Berry has been starting to get a bit freaked out by it. It's really not good for them to be uprooted all the time. When we were over in Montreal filming she thought she saw some friends from her play school in London and she wanted to go over and talk to them. We knew it couldn't be them but we went over anyway...they didn't even speak English."
'Platonov' runs until 10 November at the Almeida at King's Cross, London.
