“Game of Thrones” and “Peaky Blinders” alum Aidan Gillen waxed nostalgic about the golden age of British drama at the Transilvania Intl. Film Festival and argued that there’s “too much” content clogging the airwaves for today’s TV consumers.
“I just think there’s so much stuff. Even the TV stuff now is being designed to try and give you these little [dopamine] hits now and then,” he said. “Even the sophisticated, high-end TV stuff is also being dumbed down a little to try and keep people interested.”
He added: “There’s too much on TV.”
The Irish screen star, who’s serving on the international competition jury this week in Transilvania, is also on hand to promote his latest films: 2025 Tribeca premiere “Re-Creation,” an Ireland-set drama from directors David Merriman and Jim Sheridan based on the real-life murder case of French producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier, and “Gorky Resort,” director Łukasz Połkowski’s historical drama about a young Polish lieutenant in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp.
Speaking to a full house during an hour-long masterclass at the Transilvania festival, Gillen opened up about his career on screen, reminiscing about iconic roles in series including “Game of Thrones,” “The Wire” and “Peaky Blinders” and describing how he broke into the British theater scene as a precocious teenager.
“I’m not a trained actor. I didn’t go to drama school. I was very keen to get out of school as soon as I was able to,” Gillen said. “I found the classroom environment extremely stifling.”
The Irish actor said he turned to on-the-job training instead, joining a theater group at the age of 14 and devouring VHS tapes from a local rental shop, “watching everything from the arthouse European stuff to horror movies to Westerns to Merchant Ivory stuff.”
At the age of 18, he moved to London, where he soon found work at the Bush Theatre, a celebrated yet intimate venue that he credits with teaching him the essentials of his craft. His first big break came with a role in “Safe,” a gritty 1993 BBC drama from director Antonia Bird in which he starred opposite Kate Hardie as a young homeless man scraping by on the streets of London. Looking back, he described that period as a golden age for British TV.
“You could make these quite out-there, daring dramas with no interference that would end up on television, and like 10 million people would see it. It was quite incredible,” he said. “They don’t really do that anymore. They stopped making that stuff and started making ‘Ballroom Dancing With the Stars.’ People used to watch that stuff. It wasn’t just, ‘Oh, this is highbrow art stuff.’ It was like, ‘This is fucking brilliant drama.’”
Following the success of “Safe,” which won a BAFTA for best single drama, Gillen had a starring role in “Queer as Folk,” Russell T. Davies’ groundbreaking series about queer life in Britain in the 1990s, before crossing the pond to play the venal Baltimore politician Tommy Carcetti in HBO’s “The Wire.” Soon after came perhaps his most iconic roles, as power player Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish in “Game of Thrones” and the assassin and bounty hunter Aberama Gold in “Peaky Blinders.”
Though Gillen rued a general decline since the peak of prestige TV’s golden age, he said there’s still “loads of really daring stuff happening in television,” crediting shows like “Pluribus” for their “really sophisticated” storytelling.
While pining for the good ol’ days before “you [had] to subscribe to all these streamers,” the actor admitted that “maybe me going on about this is like the time that radio came in, and your great-grandparents were going, ‘This thing is like the devil’s work.’
“TV was like that when I was a teenager. ‘TV is going to kill our kids.’ And I used to come home from school and go to bed…and watch like 10 hours of TV,” he said.
It is perhaps that childhood sense of awe and wonder, he said, that still drives him as an actor.
“One of the reasons I wanted to become an actor is because…I always saw the world as a really amazing playground — a work of art, a living dream. I wanted to be part of that and part of painting that picture,” he said.
“It was the doing of the thing. Not the finished product, not the hotel room, not going to a film festival and walking on the red carpet or being famous or any of that stuff. I was never interested — and I’m still not — in any of that,” he said. “It’s the actual working — going in and doing it on the day — that’s what excites me.”
The Transilvania Intl. Film Festival runs June 12 – 21.