Having given one of the most talked about TV performances of 2015 as former Taoiseach Charles J Haughey in the RTÉ series Charlie, Aidan Gillen has said that even he could not see himself as the late politician when the role was first suggested to him.
Speaking to Marian Finucane on RTÉ Radio 1, Gillen said it was a surprise when one of his former Love/Hate colleagues, season two director Anthony Byrne, told him over lunch in London that he was reading the Charlie script and that he felt the Dublin actor should put himself forward for the job.
"I totally couldn't see it [at] first but he gave me the script to read and I became immediately fascinated and pursued it actively. Because I wouldn't have thought I was on anyone's list to play Charles Haughey – and I wasn't. But I got on it."
Gillen admitted that he did not have a great interest in Haughey or his politics before taking on his IFTA-winning role in the series.
"Of course, I'd grown up in Dublin in the Eighties – late Seventies/Eighties – so I was quite familiar with the figure and the party – or the two, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael," he said.
"I wasn't politically active. I didn't have that much of an interest, that much of a reason. It just looked like a load of old guys in brown suits at each other all the time, which is a very simplistic way of putting it but that's just what it seemed to me. As soon as I started researching and looking through whatever I could find from the archives, newspaper articles and all the rest of it and interviews I found him to be quite a fascinating person immediately."
The promo for Charlie which aired earlier this year:
As he weighed up whether to take on the Haughey role, Gillen said something that happened while he was walking on a Kerry beach helped him to make up his mind.
"I was looking over at the islands, the Blaskets, and looking at his island or his family's island, Inishvickillane, thinking about, 'Should I be taking this thing on? Am I going to be able to do it?' You mess up something that's going to be that in the public eye - it's not a good thing.
"I looked down the beach and saw [Haughey's son] Seán Haughey standing further down the beach looking out and I thought, 'Ok, that's interesting' and I took it as a sign. So you can blame Seán for that!"
Gillen with Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as PJ Mara in Charlie
Ultimately for Gillen, the role was "too intriguing" to decline and he told Finucane that his experiences playing Baltimore politician Tommy Carcetti in HBO series The Wire proved to be of great benefit for his performance. "I think if I hadn't done that before I mightn't have been so certain I could pull it off," he said.
When asked for his conclusion about Haughey after making the series, Gillen replied: "I'm undecided. My idea going into that job was not to be judgemental, because I think the judgement has [been] passed. The enigma that's there was quite interesting and I was interested in trying to present that and not solve it and not attempt to solve it."
"I don't consider myself to be that much of a better person," he added. "Haughey was flawed, I'm flawed. We've got that much in common."
