I feel like it took even a little bit of heat out of the attention, the fact that I wasn’t in it for Seasons 5, 6, 7, 8. It was pretty crazy, you know, it was so popular throughout. “I feel like it was nice, me leaving the show when I did. While he still gets recognised, he says, it is good for it not to be on everyone’s lips. The only negatives are just now and again somebody probably has too much to drink in a pub and is a bit annoying, but there’s no negativity really from those fan interactions.”Īll the same, he’s not complaining that some of the heat has gone out of Game of Thrones fever since its finale two years ago. So, the positives massively outweigh the negatives. “I was also able to buy a house in Dublin with the money I earned from Game of Thrones.
“I used to pray in Mass, saying, ‘Please, I want to be famous, I want to be successful, I want to act for people all around the world’. And I achieved that, so I never want to come across as ungrateful because that’s not it.
“Listen, the best counterargument is that all I wanted to do growing up was to act in a big film or a big TV show, and I achieved my utmost dream. “No, it’s quite easy to stay away from that,” Gleeson laughs, clarifying that fans intruding during dates is more the issue. It’s more when, say, you’re on a first date, or talking to a friend in a pub who’s just lost a family member, and someone comes over and takes you out of who you are in that interaction and makes you into something else.”Ī first date with a rabid Game of Thrones fan doesn’t sound healthy, I chide. “It happens very rarely that I come away from an interaction with someone who recognises me and I say, ‘oh, I wish that didn’t happen’,” he says. Nor that he and the cast would no longer be able to venture out unrecognised. Neither he nor many of his co-stars in the Medieval fantasy epic could have foreseen just how wholesale its appeal would be, the water cooler moments it would burn into our collective cultural consciousness and the anticipation that would greet each episode. “I detested the superficial elevation and commodification of it all, juxtaposed with the grotesque self-involvement it would sometimes draw out in me,” he said in a scathing critique of celebrity culture during a 2014 Oxford Union address. Citing a loss of appetite for the industry, he announced he would be retiring from acting in order to return to college life and pursue other interests. Jack was just 22 when his final episode aired in 2014. Killed off in Season 4 in a particularly infamous scene dubbed “The Purple Wedding”, Joffrey was too indelible to the very fabric of the show to be forgotten during the remaining four seasons.
Gleeson needs no introduction but here’s one anyway. As diabolical Joffrey Baratheon, he was one of the front-and-centre stars of the world’s biggest television drama, Game of Thrones, when it premiered a decade ago.īefore he even reached his twenties, his face was implanted in the hearts and minds of millions upon millions of viewers who loved to hate the horrid child king responsible for happily lopping off Ned Stark’s head and terrorising Stark’s daughter Sansa. Whereas now I’m like, ‘God, how do I say my lines, how do I move my body!’” That was when I was acting the most and was really in a good flow. “I definitely peaked probably when I was about 17. Instead, he concentrated on Collapsing Horse, the now-defunct children’s theatre company he co-founded in 2012 with Trinity pals while studying philosophy and theology. Still somehow boyish at 29, the Cork-born Dubliner is stepping back into the world of high-profile acting after a sabbatical of several years that saw him retreat from red-hot stardom. Sporting a brown mane and whiskers, Jack laughs heartily at how out of practice he is, and credits Druid artistic director Garry Hynes for her patience and general loveliness. But in terms of acting fitness or feeling rusty, yeah, definitely.” “My part, he’s not on stage for the whole thing but it’s going to be in Coole Park, outside, so even when you’re off stage, you still have to be present.