Sex Education: the surprise return of Jack Gleeson, ten years after Game of Thrones

The actor who played Joffrey Baratheon in the HBO series returns to the forefront.

Fans of Sex Education were shocked to see Jack Gleeson in the final season of the Netflix series. He makes two brief appearances (during episodes 6 and 7) in the shoes of Crazy Joe (Dodgy Mo), Sean’s friend and drug dealer, Maeve’s brother (Emma Mackey). A surprise comeback for an actor we haven’t heard from since his departure from Game Of Thrones. And for good reason.

For four seasons, between 2011 and 2014, Jack Gleeson embodied the horrifying Joffrey Baratheon in the HBO series. One of the most hated characters in the history of television. After his horrific death in the episode “The Lion and the Rose”, he decided to abandon film sets, disgusted by the culture of celebrity.

“It’s an environment that I instantly wanted to escape“, he explained at the end of 2013 during a conference organized by the University of Oxford. “I hated the superficiality and commodification that went with it, in addition to the grotesque personal involvement that it sometimes required of me..” His plans? Resume his studies and devote himself to humanitarian work, while continuing to act, but only in the theater.

Ten years later, Jack Gleeson has therefore found the flame. And he actually started his comeback some time ago, well before this notable cameo in Sex Education. In 2020, he was already making his comeback in the BBC series Out of Her Mindproduced by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, where he played the ghost of an aborted fetus coming back to haunt his mother 16 years later!

The show’s creator, Sarah Pascoe, said she had been looking for a “actor everyone wanted dead“, in reference to his role in Game Of Thrones. A very meta casting seems to mean that he is now at peace with this heavy liability. And that’s just the beginning.

After filming in 2021 in a small indie film, Rebecca’s Boyfriend, Jack Gleeson will soon show itself in a more ambitious project, In the Land of Saints and Sinners, recently presented in Venice. In this Irish thriller directed by Robert Lorenz (The Marksman), he will respond to Liam Neeson and another former Game Of Thrones, Ciaran Hinds.

Finally, we will find the actor revealed in 2005 in Batman Begins in the series The Club of Five signed Nicolas Winding Refnwhich will be seen in France on TF1.

The Club of Five by Nicolas Winding Refn has found its cast!