Jack Gleeson

 ( 1992 Births ) 

In 2011, Gleeson starred as Joffrey Baratheon in the HBO fantasy drama Game of Thrones. His performance received critical acclaim, and his character is widely regarded as one of television's best villains. In 2012, Gleeson expressed his intention to step back from professional acting to pursue an academic career once his work on the series was finished. He retired from screen acting in 2014 after concluding his work on Game of Thrones, but stated that while he had previously been interested in pursuing academia, he had since "gone off that idea". TVLine named Gleeson "Performer of the Week" for his work in the episode "The Lion and the Rose".

Throughout the 2010s, Gleeson was a member of the Dublin-based Collapsing Horse Theatre Company, of which he was a co-founder and producer. He was in the original cast of the company's first production, Monster/Clock, a Puppetry show that premiered in Dublin in 2012. His next appearance was in "lo-fi comedy", Bears in Space, which premiered in Dublin in July 2014 and was part of the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The show received positive reviews and was revived in Dublin and London in 2015, as well as Off-Broadway at 59E59 Theaters in New York in September 2016. In 2017, Collapsing Horse was appointed artistic director of the Cat Laughs comedy festival; Gleeson gave a four-hour performance "as a cat from the 9th-century absurdist poem". Collapsing Horse came to an end in November 2019.

Gleeson made two public appearances in 2019. In June, he was featured in the musical comedy program AMUSICAL at the Cat Laughs festival. Then, in August, he made a surprise appearance at Trinity Brawl 2, a wrestling event in Dublin.

Gleeson returned to the screen in Sara Pascoe's 2020 series Out of Her Mind. In 2023, he appeared alongside Liam Neeson in the film In the Land of Saints and Sinners, and guest-starred in season four of Sex Education and in the BBC adaptation of The Famous Five novels. In 2025, Gleeson reunited with fellow Game of Thrones alum Alfie Allen in the Dutch–Belgian thriller Safe Harbor. He also appeared as Puck / Robin Goodfellow in the second season of the Netflix series The Sandman and as Byron Hedges in the historical drama House of Guinness, which is loosely based on the history of the Guinness family.

Gleeson publicly supported the successful campaign to legalise abortion in Ireland in 2018.