Most people these days probably know Aiden Gillen for totally nailing conflicted mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire. For English people of a certain age though Gillen will alway be remembered as the only thing that made Queer As Folk compulsory viewing. Having spent a bunch of time treading the boards in stage productions of things like David Mamet's American Buffalo, Frank McGuiness’s shivers-down-yer-spine Someone To Watch Over Me and getting drenched as Ariel in the Almeida Theatre production of The Tempest (you know who that one’s by right?) he has has gained an unassailable level of intergrity that most Hollywood jobbers would cut their pinky's off for. He hardly ever does interviews but he's pally with our friend Gabriel Pryce. Here is a bunch more of the chat the two had for The Talking Issue which turned out really interesting. If you like The Wire, Baltimore or interesting things then you will probably be into it.Vice: Having had to live in Baltimore for big chunks of the last three years how do you feel about the place?
Aiden Gillen: A whole load of the stuff that you see in The Wire is very true to life in Baltimore but there’s more than that there as well: the whole Barry Levinson, John Waters side of things. I think its interesting that for a city the size of Baltimore the major film directors that have come out of there have set so much of their stuff in Baltimore. You wouldn’t get the same thing from a city like, say, Detroit or Philidelphia. They seem compelled to write and tell stories about it. Most people seem like they just want to get out of their cities and move to New York or Los Angeles or whatever but most of John Water’s films, if not all, are Baltimore stories and they’re all like love letters. You’d have to include David Simon in that. They all have this great love for the city.Was it something that you, as a kid from Dublin, could easily identify with?
It has this kind of gothic quality to it. Edgar Allen Poe spent most of his life there and wrote most of his books there, and John Wilkes-Boothe’s whole family is buried in a big fuck off crypt right by where he lived. That level of pride in where you come from is inspiring. I rented this house in Fells Point on Shakespeare Street, which is this cobbled street of terraced houses. It was like a street in Dublin, it wasn’t like any streets I’d seen before in the States and it was only after I’d moved into the house that I realised there was a space where there should have been a house, but all there was was a grave, this big fucking tomb. It was where William Fell, the guy who founded the area, his wife and his kid and I think his kids wife were all buried. Right there on the street Allegedly at one in the morning or whatever one or two of them stroll down the street and get into the grave.You ever catch the ghouls of Shakespeare Street in action?
No, I never got to see them, but you’d get a lot of 'haunting' tourists coming round. I didn’t know the place was supposed to be so haunted until I started getting woken up every morning by these people outside my house pointing into my window going on about "she appears there" and "that’s where she was strangled" and on and on about murdered prostitutes and stuff. Apparently Edgar Allen Poe collapsed on Shakespeare Street foaming at the mouth from some kind of mixture of syphilis, madness and curses. Poe’s house is still there. It’s this tiny little house built in the 1700’s and it’s still standing with this whole big housing project built around it called the Poe Homes. They are projects that feature in The Wire actually. So you have these guys sitting around these tower blocks doing whatever and then the odd tourist turns up, rings the bell and a guy answers the door dressed as Edgar Allen Poe. That is his job. It's pretty nuts. He runs the house and does appearances on Halloween, where he reads The Raven in this bar called the Club Charles and then goes up to Poe’s grave. Every year this masked, hooded, person appears and puts a bunch of red roses and a half bottle of brandy on the grave and a crowd always goes up to see if they can see the masked man but no one ever does. They’re definitely into the supernatural in Baltimore.Do you drink Jameson’s? I was at a pretty horrible swanky bar in London recently and Dominic West was standing next to me at the bar and I heard him order one. I figured it would be my only chance to have a whiskey with McNulty so I went for one too but when they arrived, his was in a tiny little miniature martini glass and mine was in this huge tumbler full to the brim. I didn’t want him to think I was trying to upstage him so I slunk away and drank alone.
I don’t drink very much and whiskey is not a drink that I’m very good at drinking. I think Dominic owns or is involved in owning a bar in London and I know David Simon is partial to a Jameson’s so they can both hold their drink. We were in a bar in London one night and David was secretly pouring Jameson’s into my Guiness. I could fucking taste it, it was horrible.What do you think sets The Wire apart? The police procedural is a genre so crowded you’d be forgiven for not even bothering.
There’s just so many genuine and genius little touches in the show. I mean across the board but say for example with Omar, the fact that everywhere he goes people just disappear, he’s always walking around whistling and everyone’s hiding. There’s so much in the show that’s based on real people and real things that have happened. You’ve got real people playing themselves and actors playing someone while the real person plays someone else. Delaney Williams plays Jay Landsman while Jay Landsman himself plays Denis Mello. Jay Landsman is still a cop in Baltimore and he’s the central character in David’s factual account of his year inside the Baltimore Homicide Department, Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, which became the TV series Homicide. There are also a lot of non-standard cameos, the real, Republican governor of the state of Maryland, Robert Ehrlich, played the security guard at the Governors office. I think he was totally doing it for publicity. Fucking smart move really. Or maybe it wasn’t such a smart move as he didn’t get elected. I’m not entirely sure whether The Wire had a major impact on that or not though.How do you think Baltimoreans feel about the way the city has been portayed in the show?
I think the Governor, Martin O’Malley, is definitely against the city being portrayed as a drug decimated black hole. It’s not but that’s really not what the show's saying. David Simon and Ed Burns, they’re from there and they do love the place and I think if you hold a mirror up to the way it is the idea is that people should watch it and think about it and think about changing things. O’Malley has been very involved in trying to rebuild the city and has had some success, there is a bit of a feeling of rebirth. He’s made it to Governor and I don’t know how easy that is for a Democrat in Maryland. It’s not a given. When they first started shooting they talked to O’Malley, who at that point was mayor and he was all for it. I guess he became less and less for it as time went on, but when Simon offered to move filming to Philadelphia and O’Malley said fuck it, you can shoot it here. It’s a big employer and no matter what O’Malley thought about it, it’s a source of income for the city. A lot of people there love it.Do you think you’ve inspired any Baltimore underdogs to run for mayor?
I think anybody who’s thinking of running for mayor and does so by being inspired by watching a television show is probably not going to make it. Carcetti was a bit like O’Malley in that he was young, the city was stagnant and people were a bit apathetic and he saw that he could be young, smart and push new energy into the place. That’s how I felt about Barak Obama to begin with. The Wire’s his favorite TV show and Omar’s his favorite character. He’s said that publicly. They asked him and Hilary Clinton. She said Grey’s Anatomy.GABRIEL PRYCE
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Aiden Gillen: A whole load of the stuff that you see in The Wire is very true to life in Baltimore but there’s more than that there as well: the whole Barry Levinson, John Waters side of things. I think its interesting that for a city the size of Baltimore the major film directors that have come out of there have set so much of their stuff in Baltimore. You wouldn’t get the same thing from a city like, say, Detroit or Philidelphia. They seem compelled to write and tell stories about it. Most people seem like they just want to get out of their cities and move to New York or Los Angeles or whatever but most of John Water’s films, if not all, are Baltimore stories and they’re all like love letters. You’d have to include David Simon in that. They all have this great love for the city.Was it something that you, as a kid from Dublin, could easily identify with?
It has this kind of gothic quality to it. Edgar Allen Poe spent most of his life there and wrote most of his books there, and John Wilkes-Boothe’s whole family is buried in a big fuck off crypt right by where he lived. That level of pride in where you come from is inspiring. I rented this house in Fells Point on Shakespeare Street, which is this cobbled street of terraced houses. It was like a street in Dublin, it wasn’t like any streets I’d seen before in the States and it was only after I’d moved into the house that I realised there was a space where there should have been a house, but all there was was a grave, this big fucking tomb. It was where William Fell, the guy who founded the area, his wife and his kid and I think his kids wife were all buried. Right there on the street Allegedly at one in the morning or whatever one or two of them stroll down the street and get into the grave.
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No, I never got to see them, but you’d get a lot of 'haunting' tourists coming round. I didn’t know the place was supposed to be so haunted until I started getting woken up every morning by these people outside my house pointing into my window going on about "she appears there" and "that’s where she was strangled" and on and on about murdered prostitutes and stuff. Apparently Edgar Allen Poe collapsed on Shakespeare Street foaming at the mouth from some kind of mixture of syphilis, madness and curses. Poe’s house is still there. It’s this tiny little house built in the 1700’s and it’s still standing with this whole big housing project built around it called the Poe Homes. They are projects that feature in The Wire actually. So you have these guys sitting around these tower blocks doing whatever and then the odd tourist turns up, rings the bell and a guy answers the door dressed as Edgar Allen Poe. That is his job. It's pretty nuts. He runs the house and does appearances on Halloween, where he reads The Raven in this bar called the Club Charles and then goes up to Poe’s grave. Every year this masked, hooded, person appears and puts a bunch of red roses and a half bottle of brandy on the grave and a crowd always goes up to see if they can see the masked man but no one ever does. They’re definitely into the supernatural in Baltimore.
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I don’t drink very much and whiskey is not a drink that I’m very good at drinking. I think Dominic owns or is involved in owning a bar in London and I know David Simon is partial to a Jameson’s so they can both hold their drink. We were in a bar in London one night and David was secretly pouring Jameson’s into my Guiness. I could fucking taste it, it was horrible.What do you think sets The Wire apart? The police procedural is a genre so crowded you’d be forgiven for not even bothering.
There’s just so many genuine and genius little touches in the show. I mean across the board but say for example with Omar, the fact that everywhere he goes people just disappear, he’s always walking around whistling and everyone’s hiding. There’s so much in the show that’s based on real people and real things that have happened. You’ve got real people playing themselves and actors playing someone while the real person plays someone else. Delaney Williams plays Jay Landsman while Jay Landsman himself plays Denis Mello. Jay Landsman is still a cop in Baltimore and he’s the central character in David’s factual account of his year inside the Baltimore Homicide Department, Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, which became the TV series Homicide. There are also a lot of non-standard cameos, the real, Republican governor of the state of Maryland, Robert Ehrlich, played the security guard at the Governors office. I think he was totally doing it for publicity. Fucking smart move really. Or maybe it wasn’t such a smart move as he didn’t get elected. I’m not entirely sure whether The Wire had a major impact on that or not though.How do you think Baltimoreans feel about the way the city has been portayed in the show?
I think the Governor, Martin O’Malley, is definitely against the city being portrayed as a drug decimated black hole. It’s not but that’s really not what the show's saying. David Simon and Ed Burns, they’re from there and they do love the place and I think if you hold a mirror up to the way it is the idea is that people should watch it and think about it and think about changing things. O’Malley has been very involved in trying to rebuild the city and has had some success, there is a bit of a feeling of rebirth. He’s made it to Governor and I don’t know how easy that is for a Democrat in Maryland. It’s not a given. When they first started shooting they talked to O’Malley, who at that point was mayor and he was all for it. I guess he became less and less for it as time went on, but when Simon offered to move filming to Philadelphia and O’Malley said fuck it, you can shoot it here. It’s a big employer and no matter what O’Malley thought about it, it’s a source of income for the city. A lot of people there love it.Do you think you’ve inspired any Baltimore underdogs to run for mayor?
I think anybody who’s thinking of running for mayor and does so by being inspired by watching a television show is probably not going to make it. Carcetti was a bit like O’Malley in that he was young, the city was stagnant and people were a bit apathetic and he saw that he could be young, smart and push new energy into the place. That’s how I felt about Barak Obama to begin with. The Wire’s his favorite TV show and Omar’s his favorite character. He’s said that publicly. They asked him and Hilary Clinton. She said Grey’s Anatomy.GABRIEL PRYCE