Aidan Gillen

Aidan Gillen

Actor
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Life Story

Aidan Gillen is an Irish actor. He is best known for portraying Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish in the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011), CIA operative Bill Wilson in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Stuart Alan Jones in the Channel 4 series Queer as Folk (1999), John Boy in the RTÉ Television series Love/Hate (2010), and Tommy Carcetti in the HBO series The Wire (2002).

In 2011, Gillen began playing Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish on the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011), for which he received his second Irish Film & Television Award nomination.

In 2015 he starred in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015) the second film in the Maze Runner trilogy.

Family

Olivia O'Flanagan (7 July 2001 - present) ( 2 children)

Trivia

Brown haired Irish actor who got his big break in the controversial, highly acclaimed TV series Queer as Folk (1999).
Moved back to Ireland in 2009 with his wife and two kids, daughter Berry and son Joe. Now lives in Kerry, Ireland. [2011].
Mother is a nurse and his late father was an architect.
Brother of actress Fionnuala Murphy. His brother, John Paul Murphy, is a playwright, and his other sister, Patricia Murphy, is a teacher.
He uses the surname of Gillen because someone else was already registered as Aidan Murphy in the Actors' Guild. Gillen is his mother's surname.
Was nominated for Broadway's 2004 Tony Award as Best Actor (Featured Role - Play) for a revival of Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker."
Educated at St. Vincent's C.B.S., Glasnevin.
Echoing his earlier work 14 years previous in John Michael McDonagh's short film "Second Death", Aiden Gillen repeats his exaggerated and threatening karate-moves in a similar bar scene toward Brendan Gleeson in Calvary - also by John Michael McDonagh.
The surname change, taking his mother's maiden name, came about because there was already an Aidan Murphy on Equity's books.
Appears in Poirot (1989) as the husband of Rachael Stirling. He stars in Game of Thrones (2011) where he plays an ally to Diana Rigg, the mother of Rachael Stirling.

Personal Quotes 

On his role as Carcetti in _The Wire (2002)_: We follow Carcetti's journey as a minor player in city politics to a major contender in a mayoral election. He was a young guy who was considered an upstart, who saw an opportunity to do something, maybe effect some change. We see him open up and develop a conscience. I hope he's not just coming across as smarm. I'd say he's flawed, but driven.
I'm always attracted to bold, risk-taking scripts. Both The Wire and Queer as Folk had a big scope. They were panoramas, telling ambitious stories about two cities, Baltimore and Manchester, for the first time. Some people said that Queer as Folk was sensationalist and had too much sex. The real mayor of Baltimore complained that The Wire was too bleak. But they're missing the point. Both David Simon and Russell T Davies obviously loved the worlds they were writing about.

In drama you can either pretend everything is OK, or you can show the world as it really is in the hope that it gets better.
People say The Wire's bleak, y'know, but I see it as a love letter to Baltimore, and it's one written in a very strange and complex way.
I have been in control of what I've been doing, of the career I've put together.
My own rapping skills are quite good, actually. You get this thing, I think it's called Songify or AutoRap, and you talk into them, and they auto-tune it and make it into a quite interesting musical number. And I got one where it builds it into a rap.
So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale's work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were 'Screen Twos' produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke.
There's no way the writing staff of 'Game of Thrones' haven't read 'The Art of War.' There's definitely an influence on 'Game of Thrones' from this book in both a general way and on the character of Lord Baelish and his strategies.
I don't like DVD extras. No. Especially when they do things like put out alternative endings? I find all of that a little bizarre, because there should only be one ending. I don't like to be told, 'Oh, we could have had it this way,' for the director's cut.
Becoming a father has made my life a lot more interesting. It's like everything slows down because time goes slower, and you notice that you're actually awake for so many more hours. Your waking hours elongate because you're doing things at a child's pace.
It seems to me that most characters, in anything, are flawed in some way, just like most people. You look for the good in the flawed people and vice versa, and then try and make them appealing in some way.
Heroes (2006), Desperate Housewives (2004), The Sopranos (1999) - they're all very stylized. The Wire (2002) is much more rooted in realism and honesty. In American television, I can't think of anything I'd rather have been in because it has got something to say and that is the kind of thing I want to do.

Filmography

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