Cameron Monaghan grew up on screen as Ian Gallagher in Shameless, and the long, patient, unusually honest story he and Noel Fisher were given there is still his best work. Films have since billed him high and used him little.
Fi1m perspective
The Gallagher kitchen in Shameless is loud, and most of the family are loud in it. Ian is the one who is not. Monaghan played him from 2011 to 2018, from a teenager to a man, and for most of those years what he does is listen: to Fiona, to Lip, and later to Mickey Milkovich, who arrives to make his life difficult and stays to make it something else. It is a performance built in small pieces over a long time, which is the only way that kind of performance gets built.
The story Ian and Mickey get is the show's best and its most honestly written, and we say that having admired Rossum's Fiona more than anyone else in it. It crept up on us. We had sat down for a comedy about a drunk and his children, and somewhere in the middle seasons we realised the thread we were waiting for each week was the quiet one between Monaghan and Noel Fisher, because the writers refuse to hurry it and the two actors refuse to plead for it. Ian is gay and, as the run goes on, bipolar, and Monaghan plays both as facts of a life rather than as subjects for an episode. He has said he read first-person accounts of the disorder and talked to people who have it, and it shows in how little he performs it.
Around it he did the loud work. On Gotham (2014–2019) he played twins, Jerome and Jeremiah Valeska, the series' long tease towards the Joker, a job that asks for the opposite of listening. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here. Since leaving Shameless he has done more of his acting in voice and motion capture, as Cal Kestis in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019) and Survivor (2023), where the face the player sees is built by other people from what he gives them.
The films have been less kind. He was in The Giver (2014), and he is Caius in TRON: Ares (2025), billed prominently and on screen so briefly that we came out with no clear memory of him, which is a fault of the cutting rather than of anything he did. That has become the pattern. Television and games give him years to build a person; a film gives him a name on the poster and a few minutes to justify it.
He has been working since he was five, in commercials first and then guest parts, so he has the patience. What he has not yet had is a film that wants him for the thing Shameless found in him, which is the knack of sitting in a loud room and being the one worth watching. Someone should give him a quiet part and ninety minutes and see what happens.
Biography
Cameron Monaghan is an American actor and model. Born on 16 August 1993 in Santa Monica, California, he began working as a child model at the age of three and as a child actor at seven.
He is known for his role as Ian Gallagher in the series Shameless (2011–2021) and as the twins Jerome and Jeremiah Valeska in Gotham (2014–2019). Earlier credits include Click (2006), The Giver (2014) and guest appearances in Malcolm in the Middle (2000–2005) and Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005). He also voices Cal Kestis in the video games Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019) and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (2023). Monaghan plays Caius in the film TRON: Ares (2025). He has received nominations for a BAFTA Award and a Critics' Choice Television Award.
