Identity in Flux: Aidan Gillen on Mister John

Aidan Gillen discusses his performance in Mister John, the enigmatic and bracingly original new film from Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy

Feature by Alan Bett | 20 Sep 2013

It's still quite amazing, that gap between actors and their on-screen personas. True actors, that is, as opposed to stars who merely project interpretations of themselves on screen. While sitting across from Aidan Gillen, it’s clear he’s one of the former, proving nothing like the ambitious and pugnacious Mayor Carcetti from The Wire, the role that forms our horizon of expectation.

Gillen is very pleasant, but a little reticent to indulge in self-reflection. He’s more comfortable singing the praises of Mister John, the excellent, perplexing feature he’s here to promote, and of Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy, the filmmaking duo behind the movie. “They’re quite daring,” says the 45-year-old Irishman of his directors. “Say with Who Killed Brown Owl [the pair's audacious, award-winning single-take short film], I admired the way they would go about things: saying we’ve got ten grand to make a film but we’re going to shoot it on 70mm, and the only way we’re going to be able to do that is in one shot, and to get the local girl guides and boy scouts and knitting group to act in it. They know what’s important to them and they just do their own thing, and it’s different to what a lot of people are doing.”

It certainly is. It’s also challenging. Mister John languishes in the shadow of death, masquerading as a grieving brother’s journey to Singapore; but it is much more than that. It’s said that straight roads lead to progress and twisted ones to genius. Well, Mister John is the next step: the compass is shattered, and all narrative hints prove wrong turns. “I quite like a film like that, with lots of space,” Gillen ponders, “so even as you’re watching you can drift off and think about other things and still be engaged. It’s not just plot coming at you all the time.”


“I’m a bit of an escape artist and I find that at times in my life I have just gone off and got lost and enjoyed it” – Aidan Gillen


Actually, it’s closer to a breakdown evolving on celluloid, punctuated with dark and dirty humour – the inclusion of which Gillen firmly approves. “God knows we need it,” he says. “I think we were surprised when we came to it. I don’t think that fight scene [where, after a long and tense build, Gillen’s character is easily beaten] was written to be funny, or that snake scene [which results in a comedy erection].” The whole situation his character, Gerry, finds himself in has a Beckettian absurdity: “I’m at the end of a plane ride in somewhere I don’t know, my brother is dead, my family is fucked, my life is fucked, and I just don’t give a fuck.”

It could be suggested that Gerry, who gradually morphs into his dead brother, might be an easy role for an actor. They are, after all, in the habit of continually transforming themselves, in Gillen’s case from pantomime villain across from Jackie Chan in Shanghai Knights to Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish in Game of Thrones, and most recently on our UK screens to the chilling Dublin crime-lord John Boy Power in Love/Hate. “Do we all do that?” he asks, considering the chameleon-like nature of acting for a living. “I don’t know. I’m a bit of an escape artist and I find that at times in my life I have just gone off and got lost and enjoyed it. And I guess that’s what I identified with in this script. It can be what you need at times.”

Our interview takes place before Mister John’s world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and we later hear that Gillen missed the post-screening Q&A. Perhaps he was never meant to make it, or it was just some mix-up, but it's certainly difficult to imagine him suffering staged grillings or plastic press junkets gladly. His film choices perhaps reflect this stubbornness: there must be easier ways to earn your bread than sweating it out on an independent in Singapore; there must be little incentive to perform in outrageous jagged shorts like Spunkbubble? "Your mates go, ‘do you want to be in my film?’” says Gillen, “and I always go ‘um...yeah.’”

When we bump into him the next day, he’s skulking around the DVD section of Edinburgh’s Filmhouse. As before, he’s nice and polite and chats away – then off he goes, the actor and reluctant star. Aidan Gillen to friends and family; Mayor Carcetti to us.

Mister John is released 27 Sep by Artificial Eye