New York Times:
Intrigued by Characters With Dark Mysteries
11/19/2003
When the director David Jones was trying to cast the New York revival of Harold Pinter's play "The Caretaker" early this year he called Mr. Pinter to ask about a slightly risky proposition: using a young Irish actor with no Broadway experience named Aidan Gillen.
Mr. Pinter, who appeared in a 1997 movie with Mr. Gillen, thought for a second and offered a characteristically ambiguous appraisal. "Well," he said, "he's certainly dangerous."
Leaning sideways on a stool the other day in a narrow dressing room at the American Airlines Theater, Mr. Gillen did not appear particularly dangerous. He seemed instead introspective and at times even introverted, many of his sentences severed by immense pauses or a drawn-out Dublin "ehm."
"I was never, ehm, you know, the most articulate person," he said at one point, almost apologetically, staring at a comb.
But in his 15-year career as an actor Mr. Gillen has been very dangerous in at least one way: he has often stolen the show from more accomplished actors. In "The Caretaker" his portrayal of Mick, the swaggering, unpredictable brother — alongside Patrick Stewart and Kyle MacLachlan — was praised in The New York Times by Ben Brantley, in an otherwise lukewarm review, as a "smashing Broadway debut." The Times of London called him the anchor of the popular, provocative British series "Queer as Folk," in which he played a joyfully ravenous sexual predator.
And when acting with Mr. Pinter — in "Mojo," a highly praised movie about the early days of rock 'n' roll in London — it was Mr. Gillen who was singled out by Janet Maslin in The New York Times as "the show-stopping wildcard." (Interestingly, Mr. Gillen's character kills off Mr. Pinter's.)
Mr. Gillen, 35, who grew up in Dublin in a working-class family, is visibly uncomfortable discussing such attention. "It's a strange thing to talk about, isn't it?" he said, especially in a play with only three actors — one, Mr. Stewart, a well-regarded Shakespearean veteran.
But at the same time, Mr. Gillen, who looks a bit like a young Gary Oldman, makes it clear in the course of an interview that his ambitions as an actor are nothing less than stratospheric. So, in a practical, working-class way, he views being singled out simply as a kind of bonus paycheck for very hard work. It was especially gratifying to get such a bonus on his first trip to Broadway, where he knew he would be introduced to an audience that knew little about him from his extensive stage and film work in England.
"I mean, I was coming to New York," he said, fixing an interviewer with a intense stare. "I was planning to try to get it right."
Mr. Jones said that when he was casting the play in London, he had been unable to meet Mr. Gillen because he was in Donegal, Ireland, filming a movie. So Mr. Gillen's agent sent over clips from some of Mr. Gillen's film work, and after only a brief telephone conversation with him later Mr. Jones decided to give him the part.
"It was a jump in the dark," he said, adding that Mr. Pinter was very concerned that Mr. Jones meet him first. "And I said: `Harold, I can't. I'm just going to have to talk to him on the phone.' And Harold said: `Well, that will be a very short conversation. He won't talk to you.' But it wasn't at all. He talked on and on."
Mr. Jones said that in directing Mr. Gillen he had been impressed by the work he put into the character — perfecting a Cockney accent and honing his character by watching Karel Reisz's "We Are the Lambeth Boys," a documentary about life around a hard-edged South London youth club in the late 1950's.
But he added that he was also struck by Mr. Gillen's stage reflexes. "He's got a natural animal instinct for how to play an audience, which is extraordinary," he said, adding that even after working with him closely, he still considered Mr. Gillen a person "who I wouldn't pretend to say I completely fathom."
By way of explaining this last remark, he said that in rehearsals Mr. Gillen "didn't smile for two weeks."
In a conversation that ranged from Bukowski to Brendan Behan to the British serial killers Fred and Rosemary West to Errol Flynn (he is reading Flynn's autobiography, "My Wicked, Wicked Ways," in his dressing room), Mr. Gillen did smile occasionally. For example, when he recalled how a contract for one movie part was accidentally sent to his mother, a retired nurse. The contract specified that the movie would contain "scenes of nudity and extreme violence, including self-stabbing." ("That was the first time my mother had to come face to face with her son's career," he said.)
As the youngest of six children, Mr. Gillen said that by the time he came along not much was expected of him. "I could go off for a walk and come back a week later, which I did," he said. But there is obviously something in his personality that takes great delight in confounding expectations.
In person, he is reserved, exhibiting a kind of bottled-up quality. His sparse dressing room is decorated only by a vase of flowers and the snapshots of his two children taped to the mirror. But he often gravitates toward darker characters like Mick or Francis, a violent voyeur that he played in Mark Hanlon's movie "Buddy Boy," which Mr. Gillen describes, with a slightly perverse smile, as "a love story with cannibalistic overtones."
"I like those kinds of parts," he said, "because personally I'm more interested in someone that I don't know about and really can't find out about. Those are the most interesting people to play."
But in playing such parts he also clearly loves confounding the expectations of critics and of colleagues who started out with greater advantages. He did not go to college or to drama school. And while he is a voracious reader, he says that before becoming an actor he was never even much of a student of the theater. He acknowledged, for example, that before he learned Mr. Jones was interested in him for the part of Mick he had never read one of Mr. Pinter's plays. He leaned in close to a tape recorder as he said this and added, "Sorry, Harold."
"I'm not bragging about it," he said, "but it's been a total plus for me because I don't have a preconceived idea, and I can get something fresh out of it."
Then he began to discuss his insights into Mick's troubled personality, but he stopped himself almost as quickly as he started. For all the work that goes into making such a character and the others in his career, Mr. Gillen said, he is still aware that there is a good degree of magic involved, too, and he is always a little afraid that it might vanish.
"I don't want to try to explain everything," he said, "because if I did, then I might lose it all."
