Quotes from Aidan Gillen

Becoming a father has made my life a lot more interesting. It's like everything slows down because time goes slower, and you notice that you're actually awake for so many more hours. Your waking hours elongate because you're doing things at a child's pace.

I'm always attracted to bold, risk-taking scripts.

I find still photographs make me quite self-conscious.

It might take me an hour to get to feel at ease with somebody. I don't find it easy to go into a room full of 10 people and give it all away. In the pilot season in Los Angeles I've done that a couple of times.

'You're Ugly Too' isn't a comedy, but it has a lightness of touch with a hard edge. But it's essentially a warm story tinged with a bit of melancholy in the great Irish tradition. I'm very proud of that film.

Every couple of years - no, that's every couple of weeks - I think I'm going to give up acting.

I do what I can, but I'll always give it a shot. You're not going to see me playing a Welsh character any time soon, not because I wouldn't love to. I went up to Wales once and read for a film with Rhys Ifans, and haven't been asked back since. We did have a nice time on the train on the way back.

In drama you can either pretend everything is OK, or you can show the world as it really is in the hope that it gets better.

When I was a teenager, the actors I was really into were Mickey Rourke and Sean Penn. I saw 'Rumble Fish' on my 16th birthday, and around the same time, it was 'Falcon and the Snowman' and 'Bad Boys' from Sean Penn.

For me, now, working and children is it. Theres nothing more to life.

What is the key to life on Earth?

I've made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back, you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that's a good career strategy.

I'd quite like to do a musical. I'd probably have to develop that myself.

There's a lot of 'Game of Thrones' stuff used in a lot of pastiches. I don't know if I've seen a Lego 'Game of Thrones' yet, but there must be one. And there's an animated thing that's been going on for quite some time, and Littlefinger is a newsreader in it, and it's great.

I don't really differentiate between different genres: if there's a good part going, I'll go after it, and it's preferable to me if it's something I haven't done before.

I like the Edinburgh Film Festival, and I've liked what I've experienced of Glasgow's Film Festival too.

'Heroes', 'Desperate Housewives', 'The Sopranos' - they're all very stylised. 'The Wire' is much more rooted in realism and honesty. In American television, I can't think of anything I'd rather have been in because it has got something to say and that is the kind of thing I want to do.

Both 'The Wire' and 'Queer as Folk' had a big scope. They were panoramas, telling ambitious stories about two cities, Baltimore and Manchester, for the first time.

I've enjoyed working on the TV series that I've worked on, in particular something like 'The Wire,' where there was so much time to tell the story and develop a character. I learned from that that it's best not to lay all your cards on the table straight away.

I can read people, and if the other person doesn't want to say anything, I'm fine with that. People say things when it's time to say them.

I hate it when people tell you you're good when you know that you're not.

I heat myself up over the fact that I am never going to be as good as I want to be.

I don't do a lot of reflecting. I'm usually about getting on with it.

Everything's borne out of human experience, of course - rejection, humiliation, poverty, whatever. People aren't born bad, no matter how harsh the circumstances. There is a person in there, and that person is not made of ice.