--- name: "Aidan Gillen" canonical: "https://film.one/person/aidan-gillen" roles: ["Actor"] born: "24 April 1968" reviewed_on_fi1m: 5 average_fi1m_score: 80 updated: "2026-09-17T02:14:20.490151+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Aidan Gillen Actor. Born 24 April 1968 in Dublin, Ireland. ## Details - **Work:** Actor - **Born:** 24 April 1968, Dublin, Ireland - **Active:** 1999–2013 - **Also known as:** Aiden Gillen , Aiden Murphy , Aidan Murphy ## Fi1m on Aidan Gillen > Aidan Gillen plays men who expect to be obliged and lets us watch them enjoying it. He has spent much of his career playing schemers, and the best place to see how it began is still Manchester, 1999. In the first episode of *Queer as Folk* (1999), Stuart Jones takes a boy years too young for him home from a bar, gets a phone call, and drives to the hospital where his child is being born, with the boy still in the passenger seat. Most actors would play that as a crisis. Gillen plays it as an errand. He gives Stuart the manner of a man who has never once been refused and finds the idea faintly amusing, and he never asks us to forgive him. That is the thing he does: he lets a character enjoy his own bad behaviour and declines to apologise on his behalf. Russell T Davies's series was the part that got him noticed, after theatre in Dublin and London and a first screen break in *Safe* (1993). Then came the run of television that made his face familiar in three countries: Tommy Carcetti in *The Wire* (2004–08), the Baltimore politician whose ambition the series follows across five seasons; Petyr Baelish, the scheming advisor, in *Game of Thrones* (2011–17); Aberama Gold, an assassin and bounty hunter, in *Peaky Blinders* (2017–19). They are not the same part, but the casting directors were plainly watching the same tape. Nobody hires Gillen to be the man you trust. What works is the amusement. His schemers are not tortured; they are having a good time, and the pleasure is what makes them dangerous, because it is catching. In that hospital drive we found ourselves on Stuart's side and slightly ashamed of it, because Gillen treats the phone call as an interruption to the evening rather than the arrival of a son, and he makes that funny before he lets it be anything else. He has said that he does not mind nasty roles and that "It is only a part", and the work bears it out. There is no pleading in these performances, no wink to tell us he is nicer than this. Vince Tyler goes home alone; Stuart does not; Gillen leaves the balance where Davies put it. The cost is the obvious one. A reputation for unpleasant men is convenient for casting and narrowing for an actor, and since 1999 he has been asked for the schemer more often than for anything else. He can do the other thing, the muted and sombre figure, and he has taken smaller parts that allow it, Robert in *Sing Street* (2016) among them, but those are the ones fewer people have seen. He has also made four films with the director Jamie Thraves, which for an actor this busy amounts to a habit worth following. If you want to see where it started, start where it started. Davies's first episode gives Gillen a baby, a boy and a car, and 32 minutes in which to make us like a man we should not. He manages it well before the end. The schemers came later; the charm was already in place. ## Biography Aidan Gillen is an Irish actor, born Aidan Murphy in Dublin in 1968. He began acting in his teens with the Dublin Youth Theatre and moved to London in the late 1980s, adopting his mother's maiden name as a stage name. Gillen is known for his role as Stuart Jones in the Channel 4 series *Queer as Folk* (1999–2000) and as Aberama Gold in *Peaky Blinders* (2017–2019). Other television credits include Tommy Carcetti in *The Wire* (2002–2008) and Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish in *Game of Thrones* (2011–2017). His film roles include the CIA operative in *The Dark Knight Rises* (2012), Janson in the *Maze Runner* films (2015, 2018) and John Reid in *Bohemian Rhapsody* (2018). He has received three Irish Film & Television Awards and has been nominated for a British Academy Television Award, a British Independent Film Award and a Tony Award. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (5) - *Peaky Blinders* (2013), Fi1m 77, as Aberama Gold — [page](https://film.one/tv/peaky-blinders.md) - *The Dark Knight Rises* (2012), Fi1m 74, as CIA Op — [page](https://film.one/film/the-dark-knight-rises.md) - *Game of Thrones* (2011), Fi1m 82, as Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish — [page](https://film.one/tv/game-of-thrones.md) - *The Wire* (2002), Fi1m 90, as Tommy Carcetti — [page](https://film.one/tv/the-wire.md) - *Queer as Folk* (1999), Fi1m 79, as Stuart Jones — [page](https://film.one/tv/queer-as-folk.md) ## Also known for - *Bohemian Rhapsody* (2018), John Reid - *Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials* (2015), Janson - *Maze Runner: The Death Cure* (2018), Janson - *King Arthur: Legend of the Sword* (2017), William "Goosefat Bill" - *Sing Street* (2016), Robert Lalor - *Shanghai Knights* (2003), Lord Nelson Rathbone - *Those Who Wish Me Dead* (2021), Jack Blackwell - *Blitz* (2011), Barry Weiss --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/aidan-gillen