Oh, Aidan Gillen

I went to see "Glengarry Glen Ross" with maggie33 yesterday at the Apollo and it was amazing! The play itself is hilarious, Jonathan Pryce was as wonderful as you'd expect, but the absolute star of the show was Aidan Gillen. At one point, after a particularly stunning monologue, the audience spontaneously broke into applause right in the middle of the scene. Awesome :-)

As an additional bonus, Richard Griffiths attended the play, and at the end when the actors were bowing to the audience, they also bowed once in his direction, and he bowed right back. It was so funny.

The absolute cherry on the cake, however, was that maggie33 and I actually met Aidan after the play. We were afraid that he wouldn't leave the theatre before the evening show, but he did. And we could walk right up to him to chat, because all the autograph hunters seemed to have been waiting for Jonathan Pryce instead. Idiots. Anyway, Aidan is so quiet and withdrawn in real life, it's amazing how he can project so much energy while acting, and then seem like he's hardly there when he's not on stage.

Moron that I am, I didn't take my "Queer As Folk" boxset to be signed, or even a camera to take a picture with him, so I just told him how utterly brilliant he was and asked him what he was going to do next. He said he didn't have any plans yet, and he was actually looking forward to having some time off because he'd been working non-stop for the last two years. Surely "The Wire" didn't take that long to shoot, so I assume he'd been doing more theatre. And I didn't know about it! Gah! (note to self: pay more attention to your favourite actors' schedules)

In any case, I can now add Aidan Gillen to my list of celebrities I got to meet. Living near London sure has its advantages :-)