Aidan Gillen
He’s back to explore Area 51 and Roswell in Project Blue Book
Despite three decades of playing eclectic roles around the globe, actor Aidan Gillen is still a man seeking something surprising. Whether it’s theatre, film or TV, he’s just as happy finding his space in a large ensemble piece like Game Of Thrones as he is taking the lead in Project Blue Book. But the characters have to make him intrigued. “I’ve always been after good characters in wellwritten dramas,” the soft-spoken actor tells SFX from his home in Ireland. “If it’s not well-written and not about something, what’s the point?” Luckily, he’s had quite the range of characters to pique his interest, with the most recent being the real-life ufologist Dr J Allen Hynek – soon to appear in Project Blue Book’s second season.
You’ve always been intrigued with the idea of UFOs, even before Project Blue Book, right?
Yeah, this is nothing new to me. I’ve sought it out, always. With early camping trips, I got out of the city in Dublin, out into the mountains with the Scouts or whatever, staring up, looking at shooting stars. I’ve always been awed.
Now you’re two seasons into the series, do you look at the skies any differently?
Well, I haven’t experienced anything extraordinary, or any more extraordinary than usual, looking at the sky. I just walked over to the window where I’ve been talking to you to see what I can see. It’s just quiet here around where I’m living. The [building] boom is back on again, so there’s cranes all around me and they’re really tall. You could look at it like something out of The War Of The Worlds!
The series portrays a lot of Hynek’s most infamous cases. Do you feel compelled to investigate them much?
I definitely feel like I keep a good distance from it – and we only get these scripts a couple of weeks in advance, so there’s not tons of time to do that. You’re wrapped up with shooting the thing you’re doing. Just knowing your words in that phase is kind of the important thing.
It’s your second season playing Hynek, so how does he feel like more of a lived-in persona for you?
Coming back to season two, the writers know you. They know your personality. They know how you interact with the other people. Everything eases off a little. You know what works, and what doesn’t work. There’s less explanation to do, I suppose. I feel like we get a bit more space and I interact quite a lot with Michael Malarkey (Captain Michael Quinn) particularly in season two, more so than season one.
Fans love the dynamic of your characters. Are they on more solid ground as partners this year?
We have a bit more of a vibe going and don’t have to work so hard at it. We can find spaces in the space that would have been taken up with explanation, or exposition. I think that’s important. I like watching people not talking. To get moments here and there when you’re just not talking and having a bit of the mystery – when you get it – is good.
The roles you choose to take on are always varied and often unexpected. Is there a through-line for you?
Particularly early on, going back like 20 years, I was kind of after sensational characters. Stuff like Stuart Alan Jones in Queer As Folk, and all of them, really. But you want something that’s going to be fun to play, that’s going to be noticed within a really, really well constructed drama and that’s going to be seen somewhere. And a lot of the stuff I’ve done hasn’t been seen anywhere!
Did you make time to watch the last season of Thrones?
I did watch it, yeah. It was the first time I actually took out a subscription to HBO. I didn’t have an expectation, or any idea how it could end. I thought it’s an impossible story to end. The pressure was on the creators of the show to finish it in a satisfactory way, but it can never be done. I mean, some of the episodes in the last season I loved more than any episodes I’ve seen the entire run. And some of the stuff in there was okay, or just felt as good as anything that preceded it. But how the fuck do you end it?
Did you appreciate how it did end?
There was an image halfway through the final episode where I went, “Wow, it would be great if this ended right here.” But I know that they have to address the wider world. And they did. I thought they left it in a very similar place to where the entire story started.
Project Blue Book season two is airing on History now in the US; a UK TX is still TBC.
Coming back to season two, the writers know you. They know your personality