VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Aidan Gillen & Emma Laird On Working With Jeremy Renner & Dianne Wiest

Aidan Gillen and Emma Laird reveal their favorite memories from the set of Mayor of Kingstown.

The show follows Mike McLusky (played by Renner), a power broker who lives in Kingstown, Mich., a town surrounded by several local prisons. The show discusses relevant topics, including systemic racism and the prison industrial complex. Gillen plays Milo, a powerful criminal who has control over Mike. He keeps tabs on Mike from inside prison through Iris, played by Laird.

“Milo is already in Kingstown, in one of the prisons serving a life sentence I believe, and he’s somewhat my boss and he orders me to come to Kingstown and work my magic on some men there to get what he wants,” Laird told uInterview Founder Erik Meers. “Milo’s a very powerful man and has people all over who he kind of controls and gets them to do his dirty work him, and I’m one of those people.”

“He’s quite a clinical, precise individual,” Gillen said of his character. “Good at what he does, but you know, a really not very nice person.”

“Within the main framework of the story, and the McLusky’s, and Jeremy’s character, you know, there’s some unspoken thing or unspecified within you know at least the first four or five or six episodes as to what exactly that hold I have over him is or why he would do my bidding,” Gillen added.

The actors revealed their favorite memories from set.

“I think it was just the loving nature of everyone for me and you know I didn’t really realize how hard it would be for me before certain scenes, you know, it gets really dark for Iris,” Laird said, “and I was like ‘Oh it’s fine! I act and then I go home!’ you know? And I had Dianne Wiest coming up to me, and being like ‘How are you going to cope?’ And I was really scared to meet her because it’s Dianne. And she was like ‘Emma darling! My family’s from Scotland!’ She was so loving and she was very motherly and protective and was really trying to make sure that I was going to be okay and she gave me a lot of really good advice. And she was like, you know, ‘You got to wipe your feet before a scene and wipe your feet after a scene.’ And little one-liners like that.

“I think for me it was probably just skiving off somewhere, which I tend to do,” Gillen said. “You know, on one of the first or second days I was there within this, you know, massive Victorian-era penitentiary, you know, in Kingstown. Because it’s nice to just go off and think about what you’re doing.”

Mayor of Kingstown is available on Paramount+.