Jack Gleeson

Irish actor (born 1992)

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Jack Gleeson (born 20 May 1992) is an Irish actor. He is best known for portraying Joffrey Baratheon in the HBO television series Game of Thrones (2011–2014). Following this role, Gleeson took a six-year hiatus from screen acting. He returned to the screen in 2020 and has since appeared in the Irish film In the Land of Saints and Sinners (2023) and the series The Sandman (2025) and House of Guinness (2025).

Early life

Jack Gleeson was born in Cork, Ireland, and raised in Ranelagh, Dublin, where he attended Gonzaga College. Both of his parents are lawyers. He has two older sisters, Rachel and Emma, who are also involved in Irish theatre. He attended drama classes with them when he was young, and also performed in youth theatre.

Gleeson attended Trinity College Dublin between 2010 and 2015. He studied philosophy and theology and was elected a scholar in 2012. At Trinity, Gleeson was a member of DU Players, where he met his future co-founders of Collapsing Horse Theatre Company.

Career

Gleeson began acting at the age of eight in the Independent Theatre Workshop. His first roles were in films such as Reign of Fire (2002), Batman Begins (2005), Shrooms (2007), and A Shine of Rainbows (2009). In 2010, he played a leading role in the film All Good Children, which was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. A reviewer for Variety considered Gleeson "the pic's big discovery".

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 puppet 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.

Personal life

Gleeson divides his time between London, where he moved in 2015, and Dublin. On 27 August 2022, he married his long-time girlfriend Róisín O'Mahony in a small Catholic ceremony in County Kerry.

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