Biografia

He uses the surname of Gillen because someone else was already registered as Aidan Murphy in the Actors' Guild. Gillen is his mother's surname.

Moved back to Ireland in 2009 with his wife and two kids, daughter Berry and son Joe. Now lives in Kerry, Ireland. [2011].

Brother of actress Fionnuala Murphy. His brother, John Paul Murphy, is a playwright, and his other sister, Patricia Murphy, is a teacher.

Mother is a nurse and his late father was an architect.

Brown haired Irish actor who got his big break in the controversial, highly acclaimed TV series Os Assumidos (1999).

On his role as Tommy Carcetti in HBO's A Escuta (2002): We follow Carcetti's journey as a minor player in city politics to a major contender in a mayoral election. He was a young guy who was considered an upstart, who saw an opportunity to do something, maybe effect some change. We see him open up and develop a conscience. I hope he's not just coming across as smarm. I'd say he's flawed, but driven.

I'm always attracted to bold, risk-taking scripts. 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. Some people said that Queer as Folk was sensationalist and had too much sex. The real mayor of Baltimore complained that The Wire was too bleak. But they're missing the point. Both David Simon and Russell T Davies obviously loved the worlds they were writing about.

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.

People say The Wire's bleak, y'know, but I see it as a love letter to Baltimore, and it's one written in a very strange and complex way.

I have been in control of what I've been doing, of the career I've put together.

My own rapping skills are quite good, actually. You get this thing, I think it's called Songify or AutoRap, and you talk into them, and they auto-tune it and make it into a quite interesting musical number. And I got one where it builds it into a rap.