What Game Of Thrones’ Joffrey Actor Jack Gleeson Looks Like Today
Everyone who’s ever watched “Game of Thrones” knows that King Joffrey Baratheon, played to perfection by Jack Gleeson, is one of the show’s most odious, awful characters (which is saying something). The product of incest between his mother Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and her own twin Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), Joffrey takes the throne after the death of his assumed father King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy) despite the fact that he actually has no claim to the throne, and when Ned Stark tries to (correctly) point that out, he loses his head on Joffrey’s orders. Throughout the show, Joffrey is hard to watch as he tortures people for pure sport … though it should be said that the young king’s absolutely terrible personality and whole vibe is a testament to how well Gleeson played him.
Joffrey’s tyrannical and thoughtless reign is, thankfully, brought to a merciful and swift end when he’s poisoned at his wedding to Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), killed by Margaery’s own grandmother Lady Olenna (the late Diana Rigg) merely so that Margaery didn’t have to spend her life living with a gleeful psychopath. (Joffrey’s uncle Tyrion, played by Peter Dinklage, gets blamed, but all’s well that ends well.) This all goes down in the second episode of Season 4, at which point Gleeson left the show … and for a while, the star took a breather from acting. So what does he look like now, and has he acted recently?
Jack Gleeson actually showed up in a recent Netflix series
Netflix
In 2020, Jack Gleeson returned to the small screen in the British sitcom “Out of Her Mind” in a supporting role, and he also has appeared in a few films in recent years, including the Irish film “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” alongside Kerry Condon, Liam Neeson, Colm Meaney, and Ciarán Hinds. Audiences across the world, though, probably know that he also recently showed up in two episodes of the popular Netflix original comedy “Sex Education.”
In the fourth and final season of the coming-of-age comedy, main character Maeve Wiley, played by Emma Mackey, suffers an enormous loss when her mother Erin (Ann-Marie Duff) dies — and she and her brother Sean (Edward Bluemel) are left to pick up the pieces as they grieve. So where does Gleeson come in? He plays Mo, a friend of Sean’s who’s just sort of hanging around as the siblings grapple with their new reality … and he’s very funny. Lending a bit of levity to his role, Gleeson is a welcome presence, and there’s zero trace of Joffrey Baratheon in his performance.
Whether or not Gleeson makes an even bigger return to acting in the future remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain: he’s still an incredibly talented performer. “Game of Thrones” is available to stream on Max, and “Sex Education” can be seen on Netflix.