Here’s ‘The Low Down’ on Ireland’s Aidan Gillen

If you want an idea of who Aidan Gillen is, watch his performance as Frank, a would-be artist in music video director Jamie Thraves’ debut feature film “The Low Down.” “I like to play characters who are as far away from me as possible,” Gillen says. “Unfortunately this isn’t one of them.”

Best known for playing the brash, aggressively promiscuous Stuart in the popular British miniseries “Queer as Folk,” Gillen is certainly nothing like that character. In Los Angeles to promote “The Low Down,” which opened Friday exclusively at the Cineplex Odeon Fairfax Theatre, the 32-year-old Irish-born actor is anything but gregarious and expansive.

Sitting out on the patio of the Skybar at the Mondrian, he is shy, withdrawn, uncomfortable. Even his body language is tight and constricted. He draws into himself as if he were freezing cold. And even though it’s an unusually brisk spring afternoon for Southern California, for someone who lives in London it’s positively balmy. Like Gillen, the character of Frank is simultaneously low-key and keyed-up.

Witty and elliptical, “The Low Down” is a postmodern tale of a group of Londoners in their mid-20s, “who are finding out that they’re not going to be what they thought they would be and how they come to terms with that.” Gillen’s character, Frank, studied to be an artist but is employed making props for game shows. His disappointment at how his life is turning out professionally and personally renders him “inarticulate,” Gillen says.

“The more stuck in his groove, the more mute he becomes,” he says. “But underneath there is real anxiety [and in Frank’s case, rage]. And that’s one thing the film tries to convey, the anxiety under the sleepiness of the characters.”

Film Is True to Life of Young Londoners

Having lived in London since he was 19, Gillen says the film is as accurate a depiction of his generation as has been portrayed. “It’s a real London story, not manufactured, and very true to itself,” he says. Produced on a small budget and shot in a cinema verite style, “The Low Down” has the improvised feel of a John Cassavetes film, and Gillen enjoyed the show-up-and-do-it style director Thraves demanded.

“I’m not much one for preparation,” he says. “And since the character is based on Jamie [Thraves], all I had to do was look up at him from time to time.”

Given the film’s experimental nature, however, Gillen reasoned it wouldn’t be widely embraced. “It was just too was risky. Visually it’s quite nervy, and the story is very stripped back. I thought about half the people would get it and the rest would not.” But the film was a hit with critics and audiences in London for precisely those reasons. “There seemed to be a hunger for this kind of British movie that hasn’t been seen in a while,” he says.

Despite the similarities in their personalities, Gillen’s life has been much more fruitful than that of the character he portrays in “The Low Down.” From the moment he came to London he’s worked “as steadily as I’ve wanted,” he says. “I don’t like to work all the time. I like to go away and come back so I can bring something new to it.”

With no formal training, and some limited theater experience in Dublin, he immediately landed an agent in London and started working in theater. “I don’t think you can teach anyone how to act,” he says, “you just have to do it. I don’t hold [formal training] against anyone, but I don’t think they should be given more leeway just because they studied acting.”

Still, it took him several years to commit to his profession. A turning point came in 1995 in the acclaimed Royal Court production of “Mojo,” Jez Butterworth’s enigmatic depiction of a group of low-life con men. “It was the first time I felt comfortable, maybe because I was part of an ensemble and because the script was so good.”

The teleplay for “Queer as Folk” also offered an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. “I knew it would push boundaries,” he recalls. And the character of Stuart, unabashedly wanton yet curiously sympathetic, was by far the most compelling and complex.

Of all his work to date, it’s been his most visible, sometimes annoyingly so, he says, because it has tended to overshadow his other work. Gillen would rather talk about his more recent work such as his portrayal of Ariel in Jonathan Kent’s production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” which marked the actor’s return to the London stage after a five-year absence. “It was really quite good, and very physical,” he says. “I spent a lot of time upside-down hanging from ropes.”

He will work for Kent again this fall in a production of a “Platonov,” a new adaptation by David Hare of an early Chekov work called “Play Without a Title,” which was discovered 20 years after the playwright died.

On the Big Screen Next to a Legend

He also has two films in the can. “My Kingdom” is a modern reworking of King Lear set in Liverpool, starring Richard Harris and Lynn Redgrave, in which Gillen appears as a character based on Edmond, the Earl of Gloucester’s illegitimate son. He has a starring role in “The Final Curtain” as a scheming, underhanded young game-show host engaged in a fight to the finish with an older television personality played by Peter O’Toole, in his first major screen role in several years. “It was a privilege to work with him,” Gillen says, with the kind of tossed-off compliment that usually sounds insincere, except that Gillen seems to rarely give compliments.

“My girlfriend found him quite sexy,” he says and laughs, “and she didn’t really know his film work. She’d never seen ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and his other films. I remember that she was pregnant, and there he was flirting with her, running his fingers through her hair. It’s not something everyone can get away with. But he was so gentle, so charming.”

Before heading back to England, Gillen will stop off in Canada to work in a new British miniseries, “Throw of the Dice.” Although he doesn’t enjoy being away from his 3-year-old daughter and 6-month-old son, he confesses, “Work should be fun--if you have to work. And I’ll go anywhere there’s an interesting part.”