Welcome to King Joffrey’s court! This panel was billed as a look back on Jack Gleason’s life an career, all twenty some odd years of it.

Jack said that his love for acting began because his two older sisters acted in the local community center, and he became interested. Jack joked that “if the community center had karate classes instead of acting classes, I might have got really into karate.”

The moderator brought up his first movie, the Matthew McConaughey movie, Reign of Fire.  Jack immediately called it a “really mediocre movie.” When asked, “You can say that?” by the moderator, Jack responded, “I mean, who’s going to care?” Jack pissed himself on set, but thankfully no one noticed.

The moderator  asked Jack about playing the part of Little Boy in Batman Begins. “He was christened Little Boy. His dad was John Boy.” How did that role come about? “As an actor you go to a lot of auditions, and sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t. And I got lucky.”

And then you got cast on Game of Thrones. “I thought you were going to talk about Shrooms, the Irish indie horror flick. I didn’t play Little Boy. I played Lonely Twin. Let’s not get into it. It’s not a good movie.

He said that at the Game of Thrones audition, he thought that it went well, but didn’t want to get his hopes up. He almost lost the part though, because filming of the pilot was supposed to take place during when Jack would have been taking the Irish equivalent of the SATs, and he couldn’t miss that. He thought he’d have to

Jack was asked if he read the books before they started filming? “I read the first book before we filmed the first season, but before I auditioned, I never had never heard of it. Because I’m an idiot.” When asked why he didn’t read past first book, he said, “Because I don’t have the attention span to read those kind of books. I was already studying Philosophy in University.”

When asked about his best scene, Jack responded, “I don’t know if there’s a scene where I did my best work, but the final scene that I appear in, Joffrey’s corpse is lying in the sept, and I just got to sleep for the whole day. That was amazing. I would literally fall asleep. They put those ceremonial stones on my eyes. I’d fall asleep and realize I shouldn’t have been, and there’s this acting going on around me. And I was like, (stiffens up). I don’t know if it was my best acting, but it was my favorite.”

“Shhhh, I’m trying to sleep here.”

Jack was asked if he looks up Joffrey’s demise. He responded that he did, immediately. Jack explained, “One of the first things I did when I got the part was, I looked up the Wikipedia entry on the character. When you get a job, if you know you’re going to get fired at some point, you would look up online when it would happen.” Was he upset to leave the show? No. He explained, “Four seasons is enough. Three seasons, two episodes, that was enough. I think everyone in the cast still loves performing and acting in the show, but my dad says to leave the party early, and not be the last at the party. I feel like I left at the right time.”

On Joffrey’s death scene, Jack said, “It’s very hard to try to pretend to choke to death. Has anyone here choked to death before? It’s hard to do that and make it convincing.”

When asked if which role he would have wanted to play besides Joffrey, “Probably Hodor. From an acting point of view, you only have to learn one line.”

Jack never watched Games of Thrones while he was on the show, because he doesn’t like to watch himself on screen. Did he pick up the show after Joffrey died? Jack joked, “No, it’s too much to catch up on. Even when I got the scripts, I would only read my own scenes. I’m selfish. Maybe I should get into it. I hear it’s good. It always wins Emmys. Maybe I should give it a shot.”