Aidan Gillen, the Irish actor whose career has spanned mainstream television and European independent cinema, will be joining the jury of the Official Competition at the Transilvania International Film Festival (June 12–21, 2026) in Cluj-Napoca. The festival will also screen two of his most recent films: Gorky Resort and Re-creation.
Audiences most readily associate him with Petyr Baelish — known as Littlefinger in Game of Thrones — one of the series' most decisive players in its web of power struggles. Long before that HBO success, however, Gillen had already made a name for himself in the UK through the role of Stuart Alan Jones in Queer as Folk, Russell T Davies's groundbreaking series that transformed how British television portrayed queer life in the late 1990s.
In The Wire, he played Tommy Carcetti, the ambitious politician navigating his rise through a Baltimore defined by corruption and compromise. Later, in Peaky Blinders, he appeared as Aberama Gold, the assassin and bounty hunter who becomes one of the Shelby family's key allies. His television work also includes Love/Hate, Kin, and Project Blue Book.
Alongside his TV career, Gillen has maintained a steady presence in film, moving between independent productions and studio features. He worked with Christopher Nolan in The Dark Knight Rises, playing CIA operative Bill Wilson; appeared opposite Brendan Gleeson in Calvary (dir. John Michael McDonagh); and took on the role of John Reid, Queen's manager, in Bohemian Rhapsody (dir. Bryan Singer).
Two of his latest projects will be shown at TIFF.25. Re-creation (dir. David Merriman, Jim Sheridan), inspired by a true story from 1990s Ireland, reconstructs the mysterious disappearance of a woman through a fictional trial in which a jury grapples with an impossible verdict. Gorky Resort (dir. Łukasz Połkowski) is a psychological thriller set in a Soviet POW camp, tracing the tense confrontation between a young Polish officer and the interrogator determined to break him.