Jack Gleeson
Jack Gleeson is an actor, born 1992.
Gleeson was born in Cork in 1992 and was already on film as a child, uncredited in Reign of Fire and as one of the twins in the Irish horror picture Shrooms. Then, at around nineteen, he was cast as Joffrey Baratheon in Game of Thrones, and that was the rest of his twenties decided for him.
The performance is better than its reputation, mostly because its reputation is just how much people hated the character. What Gleeson actually plays is a frightened boy who has worked out that nobody is allowed to stop him, and the fear is as legible as the cruelty in every scene. He keeps the voice small and slightly petulant instead of reaching for menace, which is the harder and correct choice. A great many actors have played a monstrous king. Almost none have made one seem this convincingly like a teenager.
Then he stopped. The extract records a six-year hiatus from screen acting after the series ended, and a return in 2020. Since then the work has been Irish and deliberately modest: Kevin Lynch in In the Land of Saints and Sinners, Thomas Wentworth in The Famous Five, Puck in The Sandman, Byron Hughes in House of Guinness in 2025.
Seven screen credits in total, one of them enormous. He appears to have wanted it that way.
Movies (3)
TV (4)
Where to start with Jack Gleeson
There is only one place to start and you already know what it is. Game of Thrones contains the whole argument for him as an actor, and the early seasons in particular are where the performance is doing its most careful work, before the character becomes an event.
After that, In the Land of Saints and Sinners is the return worth watching, a slow Irish thriller where he plays someone very far from a king and does it without a trace of the old role. The Sandman gives him Puck, which is exactly the register you would hope he would be handed, mischief with real teeth in it. House of Guinness is the most recent, and Shrooms is a curiosity: a middling 2007 horror film with a teenage Gleeson in it, useful mainly for seeing how young he actually was when the big job arrived.