Being a faceless member of a mob, I soon realized, is far more comforting than teetering on a brittle pedestal one inch off the ground. In a long and wide-ranging talk given at the Oxford Union last year, Gleeson said that fame not only “embarrasses” him, but he also feels that being a celebrity is an exercise in “dehumanization.” Despite admitting that he once dreamed of being a famous actor, Gleeson said the reality was far different: “I detested the superficial elevation and commodification of it all, juxtaposed with the grotesque self-involvement it would sometimes draw out of me. Yet Gleeson has been quite open in the past about his feelings on celebrity culture in general and his own unpleasant experience with fame, which go deeper than any one toxic role. I hope that playing Joffrey didn’t help make him want to retire from the profession because he does have quite a gift for it and could have a major career as an actor.” “I feel a little guilty that he’s quitting acting now. He created someone that everybody hates, and loves to hate, and that’s a considerable feat of acting. “He’s very perceptive and he played this loathsome character and somehow made him more loathsome. I hope that playing Joffrey didn’t make him want to retire from the profession because he does have quite a gift for it.” Here, all the looks the cast members wore on the red carpet. “I feel a little guilty that he’s quitting acting now. Ahead of the the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, HBO hosted a premiere event in New York City. “He created someone that everyone hates, and everyone loves to hate, and that’s a considerable feat of acting,” said Martin.
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Martin, the author of the GoT books from which the HBO series is based on, even admitted to EW that he feared Gleeson’s experience playing such a hated character could have put him off of acting. In a show filled with amoral or despicable characters, Gleeson’s character stood apart as the worst of the pack, a sadistic and cowardly fiend with unmitigated power to boot. But it was his turn as Joffrey in Thrones that really put him on the map. He also ordered for all of Robert Baratheon’s illegitimate babies to be killed, made prostitutes attack each other, and he himself murdered a woman in cold blood with a crossbow.Gleeson, who comes across as gracious and humble in interviews, started his on-screen acting career with roles in Batman Begins and A Shine of Rainbows. He commanded his knights to beat her, threatened to rape her while his knights held her down, and threatened to make her eat her own brother’s head served on a platter. He ordered the death of Ned Stark and then planned to marry Ned's daughter, Sansa, after the aforementioned head-gazing incident. They showed firmly that this pseudo-medieval fantasy world was dark, brutal and anything but twee.
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Joffrey and his misdeeds, in all of their lurid violence, are some of the things that really set Game of Thrones apart from other TV shows in its early days. The way we remember Joffrey is largely down to the superb way he was played by Gleeson, with evil coursing through him as pure as a mountain stream, his cherubic face contorted into the disturbing sneer of a psychopath. One of the reasons it was so surprising that Gleeson decided to quit acting was that he was so good at it. He elaborated on his decision in a speech at the Oxford Union in 2014, calling the fame that came with exposure as part of the Game of Thrones cast “an environment from which I instantly wanted to retreat”. “It’s not like I hate it, it’s just not what I want to do,” Gleeson said of acting at the time. He took up a place to study Philosophy and Theology at Trinity College Dublin.
Joffrey’s screen death came with Gleeson’s simultaneous decision to quit acting altogether at the age of 21. Joffrey’s evil deeds, however, still loom large, and their effects are still being felt in Westeros and beyond - even seeping into the real world. These days there are far more ice zombies in the show, and far fewer fiancées forced to gaze on the severed head of their own father.
Remember Joffrey? One of the most evil characters in HBO's Game of Thrones - a crowded field to be sure - was played with chilling, nauseating aplomb by the young Irish actor Jack Gleeson, and then killed off smartly at his own wedding in season four.īut the golden-haired boy king’s reign of twisted horrors, which at the time seemed endless, belongs to a bygone TV age.