Trick or treacle?

Aidan Gillen has a reputation for being a reluctant interviewee, but he couldn’t be more forthcoming as we sit down in a Dublin 2 hotel to discuss the new £30,000 independent film he stars in alongside Van Helsing and The Illusionist man Tom Fisher and supremely talented big screen newcomer Riann Steele.

No, I haven’t missed a few zeroes off that figure. Treacle Jr. – see page 103 for Roe McDermott’s excellent review and synopsis – really was made for less than Jennifer Aniston’s annual hairdressing bill.
“The writer and director, Jamie Thraves, re-mortgaged his house to fund Treacle Jr. knowing that it’ll do well to break even,” the Dublin actor reflects. “It was a three-week shoot, which is incredibly quick. We’ve had great reviews and festival reactions, but this isn’t the new Once. We’re not going to have Steven Spielberg saying he loves it or two of the characters appearing in The Simpsons! None of us were in it to strike gold. The goal was to make the film we wanted to make and hope that enough people like it in order for Jamie to hang on to his home!”
Although set in contemporary inner city London, Gillen’s character is based on the young Aidan Walsh, the eccentric fiftysomething Irish promoter and performer who was the subject of Shimmy Marcus’ 2000 Master Of The Universe documentary.

A so-called “blue baby” who was deprived of oxygen at birth, Walsh was given away by his parents and spent his formative years in the not always benevolent care of a religious run orphanage.
“Aidan’s been a figure of fascination for me since I was eight and an altar boy at Gardiner Street Church where he used to live and work in his pre-album recording and cowboy days,” his namesake resumes. “I was drawn to the fact that he looked strange, talked strange and despite having all the odds stacked against him, was wildly optimistic. He’d been dealt a shit hand but wouldn’t allow himself to be put down.

“I see a lot of parallels between him and Daniel Johnston. Aidan hasn’t brought out any albums since the ‘80s, but they’re both outsider artists who’ve been embraced to lesser and greater extents by the mainstream. He also belongs to that line of great Dublin characters going back to Bang Bang and Matt Talbot even.”
If you’re not au fait with those gentlemen, the always-obliging Mr. Google will fill you in.
“Jamie and I want to make it clear though that Treacle Jr. is not Aidan Walsh’s story,” he stresses. “My character is based on him, but what happens in the film isn’t necessarily a reflection of what’s happened to Aidan in real life.”

Despite the declaimer, you doubt whether Thraves would have the Treacle Jr. Aidan tell Rian Steele’s tart with absolutely no heart Linda, “I’ve never really done this (have sex) before... well maybe at the school with one of the Christian Brothers” unless there was some factual basis for it.

“Like I say, none of it is based on anything that I know to have happened,” Gillen insists. “In films that directors and actors devise between them, the latter will nearly always pull these characters from people they’ve encountered. We told Aidan what was going to be in the film, and he was okay with it all.”
In what is likely to be the year’s unlikeliest buddy movie, Aidan befriends Tom Fisher’s Tom – Thraves isn’t mad gone on changing Christian names – who’s been sleeping rough since walking out on his seemingly perfect marriage.
“It’s actually supposed to be Tom’s story, not Aidan’s,” Gillen laughs. “How Jamie describes it is that, ‘Tom’s in this arty, moody film where he’s walking around in his black coat and not saying anything and then it’s hijacked by this fucker! And he’s thinking, ‘This is my film about my breakdown!’”
All I’ll say about Treacle Jr.’s big denouement is that it starts with Linda calling Aidan “a slow spasticated cunt” as he finally realises she’s bad news and chucks her out of his flat.

“It’s a harsh line, but it had to be,” Gillen proffers. “It didn’t register as much with me as it did Jamie who kept going on about it. It hurt him to hear Linda say those words, but she’d been boxing the shit out of Aidan and pretending to be his girlfriend when all she was doing was exploiting him. I think it’s exactly what she would say.”
Treacle Jr. couldn’t be any more diametrically opposed to Game Of Thrones, the big budget HBO fantasy series, which resumed shooting last week in a by all accounts godforsaken quarry outside Belfast.
“That’s why they went to Hollywood to finish it off – they needed some sunshine after all that freezing wind and rain!” he laughs. “I’m going back up there tomorrow and will probably be on set until October. It would’ve been great for the industry here if we could have got them to film in Ardmore – we took a big hit with Camelot not being renewed. A lot of the people working on The Tudors moved over to that – but Belfast’s a part of Ireland too. I don’t think anybody 20 years ago could have imagined what a vibrant city it is now. I don’t know if it’s in any way connected to Game Of Thrones being shot there, but there are loads of American and Japanese tourists walking round the place.

“There’s not as much time as you’d get on a big budget movie – I think it’s something like eight or nine days per episode – but the overall production values are just as high. I’m looking forward to the next couple of series, presuming it’s renewed, because my character Petr Baelish becomes more and more central to the story. At the moment he’s quite peripheral. I had more to do in three weeks of Treacle Jr. than I did in six months of Game Of Thrones. Having been on The Wire I know how long-form drama works though and am in no rush to be the big star.”
With there being so much special effects wizardry, I imagine it’s difficult to get a handle on what the finished episode is going to look like while making it.

“There’s not as much CGI as you think. And because they spend so much time setting up each shot, you do have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to look like when it makes it to screen. What’s clever about Game Of Thrones is that there’s a lot of talk of magic, but you don’t see it. It’s modern human themes set in medieval times.
“It’s interesting that Neil Jordan’s now gone the American TV route as well. He’s been talking for years and years about making a film of The Borgias, but it’s taken the Showtime channel to make it happen.”

Talking as he was a moment ago about the greatest TV show in the world… ever! did Aidan know that Tommy Carcetti would over the course of five seasons go from being a complete shit to a person with redeeming qualities?
“No and neither did the writers themselves,” he reveals. “As carefully mapped out as the storylines were, there was always wriggle room in terms of how the characters evolved. I’d only discover what Tommy was up to a day or two before we started shooting when I got the script.

“The first conversation I had about The Wire was with Rob Colesberry, the executive producer who cast me and also played Ray Cole. He came to see me in New York where I was doing a play at the time, and said, ‘We have this character who may go this way or that way. The only thing I can say for certain is that he’ll be getting his hands nice and dirty.’ I liked Tommy going from being a twat to, well, slightly less of a twat! That’s probably what would happen to a guy like that who’s come in to politics through family and doesn’t think about his motivations until shit starts happening. Incidentally, Rob Colesberry died before Season Three started shooting, which was really tragic.”

Complete workaholic that he is, Aidan has also found time to star alongside Robert Sheehan, Ruth Bradley, Brian Gleeson and Ruth Negga in a second series of RTÉ’s Dublin gangland drama, Love/Hate.
“I don’t just want to be doing the one thing, and John Boy is a lot of fun to play. I always used to be the youngest cast member, but in Love/Hate I’m the oldest by almost 20 years. I’d be saying stuff and they wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about. It was nice getting to use my own accent for a change and going back to my Mum’s after a day’s shooting.”

When he’s in Ireland do people recognise him as Tommy, Petr or John Boy?
“I get a lot of Wire chat in Dublin. I noticed that before anyone else was illegally downloading it they were downloading it illegally here! They weren’t of the Frank Butcher/EastEnders ‘You shagged your wife’s sister!’ variety – it was all the little plot subtleties, which half the time I hadn’t picked up on myself.
“I spend quite a bit of time down in Dingle where because of John Boy I have kids coming up to me asking for drugs! They buy into the character totally. I’m really fortunate to be playing such great roles.”