Game of Thrones and Peaky Blinders alum Aidan Gillen reminisced about the golden age of British drama at Transylvania International Airport. The festival argued that the airwaves are packed with “too much” content for today’s television consumers.
“I think there’s so much out there. Even TV shows these days are designed to give you a little (dopamine) hit from time to time,” he said. “Even sophisticated, high-end TV shows are being simplified a little to keep people interested.”
He added: “There’s just too much on TV.”
The Irish screen star, who is on the jury for an international competition in Transylvania this week, is also promoting his latest film. The 2025 Tribeca premiere “Re-Creation” is a drama set in Ireland by directors David Merriman and Jim Sheridan, based on the true story of the murder of French producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier, and Łukasz Pawkowski’s historical drama “The Gorky Resort” is about a young Polish lieutenant in a Soviet POW camp.
Speaking to a packed audience at a one-hour masterclass at the Transylvania Festival, Gillen spoke about her on-screen career, recalling her iconic roles in series such as Game of Thrones, The Wire and Peaky Blinders, and how she broke onto the British theater scene as a precocious teenager.
“I’m not a trained actor. I didn’t go to drama school. I really wanted to finish school right away if I could,” Gillen said. “I felt that the classroom environment was very stuffy.”
The Irish actor instead turned to on-the-job training, joining a theater company at 14 and devouring VHS tapes at local rental shops, watching “everything from European art to horror films to westerns to Merchant Ivory.”
At 18, he moved to London and quickly found work at the Bush Theatre. It’s a famous yet intimate theater that he credits with teaching him the essence of his art. His first big break came in 1993 with a role in Antonia Bird’s gritty BBC drama Safe, in which he played a young homeless man slogging through the streets of London, opposite Kate Hardy. Looking back, he said it was a golden age for British television.
“Being able to create these really quirky, bold dramas without any interference that ended up being broadcast on TV and seen by 10 million people was pretty incredible,” he said. “They don’t do that anymore. They stopped making that stuff and started making ‘Ballroom Dancing with the Stars.'” That’s how people used to watch it. It wasn’t just, “Oh, this is highbrow art.” I was like, “This is a great drama.” ”
Following the success of “Safe,” which won the BAFTA award for Best Single Drama, Gillen starred in Russell T. Davies’ groundbreaking series “Queer as Folk,” about queer life in 1990s Britain, before moving across the pond to play sexualized Baltimore politician Tommy Carcetti on HBO’s “The Wire.” Arguably his most iconic roles followed soon after, including power player Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish in Game of Thrones and assassin and bounty hunter Abelama Gold in Peaky Blinders.
Although Gillen lamented the overall decline since the peak of prestige television’s golden age, he still said “there’s a lot of really bold things happening on television” and praised the “really sophisticated” storytelling of shows like “Pluribus.”
Reminiscing about the good old days when “you had to subscribe to all these streamers,” the actor admitted, “Maybe I’m talking about this back in the days when radio came out and your great-grandparents were like, ‘This is like the devil’s work.'”
“When I was a teenager, that’s what TV was like: ‘Television is going to kill kids.’ I’d come home from school, go to bed… and watch TV for about 10 hours,” he said.
Perhaps it’s that sense of awe and wonder from his childhood that still drives him as an actor, he said.
“One of the reasons I wanted to be an actor is because…I always saw the world as a really great playground, a work of art, a living dream. I wanted to be a part of it and be involved in painting that picture,” he said.
“It was about doing things. It wasn’t about the finished product, it wasn’t about hotel rooms, it wasn’t about going to film festivals and walking red carpets, it wasn’t about being famous or anything like that. I wasn’t interested in any of that, and I still am,” he said. “The actual work, getting there that day and doing it, that’s what excites me.”
The Transylvania International Airport Film Festival will be held from June 12th to 21st.
