‘People think I’m awkward and moody and live in a cottage in Kerry’
In an extraordinarily open interview, Aidan Gillen tells Barry Egan about hunting down Dennis Hopper’s grave, his friendship with Harold Pinter, Niall Toibin signing his Equity card, his childhood, his obsession with Chris de Burgh, how artists torture themselves and how he doesn’t live in a cottage in Kerry on his own
JUST putting it out there. Aidan Gillen, who is soon to play the lead in Faith Healer at the Abbey, says of theatre audiences: “You don’t want to see feet-tapping, even on a good night. It is really distracting. But I would see foot-tapping as a challenge; that I need to arrest their attention more. Or there could be people who have been brought. I always see people who’ve been brought — partners or husbands or cousins — as a challenge…”
When he started off in London at the Bush Theatre, a tiny establishment over a pub in Shepherd’s Bush, the audiences were far more challenging: they were drinking pints and smoking “and throwing cigarettes”.
“One night during a play with a pool table in it,” Aidan remembers, referring to Handful of Stars, part 1 of Billy Roche’s much-loved Wexford trilogy, “I chipped a ball into the audience and I went ‘F**k!’. Then out of the darkness, the ball came back and landed on the table and went into the hole. And there was a huge round of applause. That was 1988.
“Then 20 years later,” Aidan continues, “I bumped into someone in a Tube station (who said) ‘it was my brother who threw the ball that night’. And guess what? He was blind.’ ”
The son of an architect, Aidan grew up in Drumcondra in Dublin, the youngest of six kids. “I don’t think any one of us was going to be a doctor; it wasn’t that kind of thing,” he told Interview magazine in 2017. I ask him about that comment now.
“It was probably in the context of being asked what my parents thought about me setting my eyes on the perilous career of an actor, and that there wasn’t pressure on achieving high status-like positions on leaving school as there might be in certain societal levels,” he says.
“I mean there would have been the practical ambition for you to be self-sufficient, however that was achieved. Not that any of us in the family couldn’t have been a doctor. I think one of my brothers might be a doctor of something by now actually. And I have a niece who’s a real doctor. And an uncle, now that I think of it. In fact, he was a flying doctor.”
As a kid, Aidan enjoyed making “fake movies in the back garden” with his siblings. What kind of movies were they?
“Nothing too good, I’d say — just jumping around doing kung-fu moves and firing pretend guns.”
It seems the stuff of dreams that Aidan, who was in the National Youth Theatre at the age of 14, would leave those kung-fu moves behind him to become Tommy Carcetti on The Wire (2004-08), Littlefinger on Game of Thrones (2011-17), Stuart Jones on Queer as Folk (1999-2000), crime lord John Boy on Love/Hate (2010-11), CIA agent Bill ‘Big Guy’ Wilson in The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Queen manager John Reid in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), to name but a few.
He said in 2017 that the character closest to him was from one of his lesser-known projects, Treacle Jr. in 2011. “I played this quite lovable, optimistic character called Aidan, conveniently enough,” he told Vanity Fair.
Is he lovable and optimistic? “I can’t say whether I’m lovable or not but, yeah, I’m optimistic, generally.”
Did Niall Toibin really sign his Equity card when Aidan was starting off ?
“Toibin signed it, as in forwarded me for membership — you have to be proposed by a member. I was in a play with one of the Toibin girls at the time and he’d seen it and I got her to ask him to sign my application. I’d like to think that he wouldn’t have done it if he thought I was shit. He was good like that with younger actors, and, I think, believed in the union, so…”
In 1997, Aidan acted with Harold Pinter in the film adaptation of Mojo. They hit it off. So much so that in 2003, when David Jones was casting the New York production of Pinter’s The Caretaker, the great playwright recommended the intense young Dubliner.
In that play, Aidan played opposite the more well-known Patrick Stewart and Kyle MacLachlan. It was he who got the Tony nomination and a rave review from the New York Times, who said: “Of the three only Mr Gillen is fluent in the language of ambiguity that is the currency of Pinterland.”
Asked about his interaction with Pinter, Aidan says it was “limited, terse, Pinteresque. Didn’t see him that much and I didn’t say much. He may have appreciated my ability to not say anything stupid at the expense of tension.”
Pinter said Aidan was “dangerous”? What did he mean by that comment?
“I suppose he thought I was dangerous in the performance as Baby in Mojo. Dangerous is a compliment for an actor and I mean, Baby had to be dangerous. We were only in one scene together; he told me I had a nice sunburn because I was cycling round indoors on a bike with my shirt off and wearing it as a turban and I rang the bell on my bike in response. Then I threw my bike off the roof, that kind of thing.”
A few years ago Aidan was in Albuquerque working on Project Blue Book when he flicked through a book in a motel that mentioned that Dennis Hopper was buried 40 miles outside Taos and “that it was really hard to find”, out in the wilds of New Mexico somewhere. He rented a Hyundai, drove around and eventually found this “very ordinary cemetery in the middle of nowhere really, with the backdrop of stunning mountains. There was this simple wooden cross that has his name on it. Some one had left a painting on the grave of Dennis as Frank Booth from Blue Velvet.”
It is another Frank who has been consuming Aidan of late: he is set to play Frank Hardy in Brian Friel’s
Faith Healer at the Abbey Theatre. It is a modern Irish classic, definitely one of the plays of the last 50 years.
“Aidan Gillen is the ideal actor to play Frank Hardy, the Faith Healer,” the play’s director Joe Dowling tells me. “While on the surface he seems introverted and shy, he is capable of deep emotional connection with the character. He combines a strong stage presence with a keen intelligence. He has the natural capacity to charm an audience and, in an instant, convey anger and disdain. He knows how to tell a story, and has a personal vulnerability that is very attractive to watch as the play unfolds.”
Frank is an itinerant faith healer who rarely heals anyone, least of all himself, as he travels around Scotland and Wales in a van with his wife and his manager. Each of the characters tells incidents from their past; they all have different versions of the same events. What does Aidan draw from within himself to play a part like Frank?
“Faith Healer is very easy to get wrong and it is very difficult to get it right. It is deceptively simple to read. It looks easy. But it is very complicated, and the people in it are complicated. It is a complicated story told in different ways by different people. But the way to pull it off is for it to be performed without vanity, in a stark way that comes completely from your self, I think. If you don’t have either aspects of that personality or at least an understanding of it within yourself, then maybe it is not going to go the way you planned.
“But look, this is a play that is on the surface about three people travelling in England, Wales, Ireland in... whenever it is… the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s… it is about a number of things, but it’s an allegory for the life or the make-up of an artist or a writer or an actor, a creator. You know, the fleetingness of the muse, the sometimes desperate nature of that lifestyle as your inspiration maybe deserts you; the constant questioning of ‘Are you any good? Are you a hack or are you a genius?’.
“No matter how good you are,” Aidan continues, “that’s what you will torture yourself with for the rest of your days. Actors suddenly have a flashback to 25 years ago and they go, ‘F**k! That’s how I should have walked through the door that time that night in 1988!’.
“Faith Healer is about that, really. The make-up of the artist; how they can torture themselves.”
Ben Brantley touched on this in May 2006, writing about Faith Healer in the New York Times: “An Irishman in self-imposed exile, Frank is an egocentric, hard-drinking, irresistible man who is so suspicious of his talent and so afraid of losing it that he makes everyone around him suffer. You’ve heard all this before, no doubt, in books, films and plays about artists like Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas and Diane Arbus, brilliant souls crucified on their own talent.”
I’m not explicitly saying Aidan Gillen is “crucified on his own talent”, but you would be hard-pressed to meet a more intense 51-year-old man. I have been out for drinks and dinner with him and his girlfriend of five years, actress and singer Camille O’Sullivan, several times over the years. They were even at my 50th birthday party. They headlined INM’s Rock Against Homelessness in aid of Focus at my request at the Olympia last year, and they recorded a song, an alt-operatic duet of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams immortalised (in) famously in David Lynch’s 1986 classic Blue Velvet with the aforementioned Hopper, that I helped put together.
Yet interviewing Aidan in a dressing-room at the Abbey, where he is rehearsing Faith Healer, it is like I am meeting him if not quite for the first time, maybe the second. I am told in advance that he doesn’t want to discuss Camille or his private life (he has two kids with his ex-wife). He wants to stick to the play.
In 2007, the late Kate Holmquist described how Aidan “pulls his black Adidas jacket up over his ears as though he’s hiding. Then pulls it down and tries to sit still, but then his hands are in his hair constantly, pulling it, bending it, working it like clay, until eventually it stands straight up, like the black comb of an exotic bird.”
The afternoon I talk to him, the edgy exotic bird is still in evidence. He spends the first three minutes of our meeting agonising poetically about whether the chairs we are sitting in are uncomfortable to talk in. Yet he is warm, funny and very cool with it (I liked him from the first ultra-awkward moment I met him years ago). Asked what is the biggest misconception he feels people have about him, Aidan says: “That I’m awkward and moody and live in a cottage in Kerry on my own, although now that I think of it, I have been/done all those things in my time.”
I ask him is it true, as I’ve heard, that he can’t pass a fridge without eating something from it?
“Pretty much. Not just a fridge. Sometimes I have at-home picnics on the floor in front of the fridge.”
And is it true (according to a Hot Press interview a few years ago) that his mother once said to Aidan that he looked miserable on stage?
“No. What I said was that my mother thought I looked miserable during curtain calls... which is true — that she said it and that I probably do — as it’s like suddenly you have to be yourself after pretending all night and look the people you’ve had this weird covenant with all night straight in the eye.”
Aidan had an “unhealthy obsession” with the song Spanish Train by Chris de Burgh when he was ten, he is honest enough to admit.
The first film he saw that had a deep impact on him was “probably Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
Later, in his mid-teens Aidan was “definitely affected” by the German film Christiane F, about the drug scene in West Berlin in the 1970s. He can remember it “made me angry among other things; and marching through town after it in a mood”.
On his 16th birthday Aidan went to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish — “alone. That was a big one for me. That’s the one that really made me start to appreciate the art of cinema.”
Aidan’s earliest childhood memory is looking at flecks of dust through “some frills on a pram veil, perched at the top of a staircase in my godmother’s house while my mother was downstairs with her somewhere. Or maybe playing with a metallic purple toy car facing into a corner on Christmas Day. Sitting on the floor looking at my mother and an older lady blowing clouds of Benson and Hedges smoke in the air... or was it watching my mother making a Christmas cake while I read a book that had elves in it, and they were making cakes too?
“And like all the best memories of a 51-year-old I’m not sure now if they’re even real. Very Faith Healer.”
‘I can’t say whether I’m lovable or not — but I’m optimistic, generally...’