After being dormant for months, the Making Game of Thrones blog has sprung back to life in the last few weeks. Now, as part of the promotional run up to Game of Thrones Season 6, HBO has begun publishing official interviews with the cast concerning the upcoming season. First up: Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth), who has been just about everywhere since the promotional period began.
Of all the cast members, Cunningham has always been one of the most enthusiastic interviewees. In this interview, he uses adjectives like “glorious” and “stunning” to describe the upcoming season. And that’s just when he’s discussing a single episode, one he believes will outshine his personal favorite so far: “Hardhome.” Not that filming it was easy. “I watched the last half hour (of “Hardhome”) with my jaw in my hand. And it is going to pale in comparison with what we’ve got coming up. What we’ve got, and the misery we went through to shoot it, is going to be absolutely glorious. There’s going to be some stunning stuff coming. I mean really, really stunning.”
But though the battles may be forefront of his mind, he hasn’t forgotten that his character—and Melisandre—have all but lost their reason to live after the death of Stannis. “…our original reason for living—for interacting—has been removed, in a sense.”
We’ve had this hate-hate relationship and now we find ourselves in the same boat. It’s a very weird place. We’ve see in the trailer Melisandre say what she saw in the flames was wrong. Her faith is shaken to the core. Whatever she’s believed in has blown up in her face and led to death and destruction. And Davos shows great concern for her because he doesn’t know she’s the one who burnt the one thing that he loved in the world. So we’re going to be watching the whole thing unfold.
Cunningham believes that Davos’ resistance to religion and his pragmatism is part of what draws the audience to his character. That and the fact that Davos’ world view is pretty set in stone. Cunningham says that’s probably the hardest part about the character: keeping it simple. “He has—for want of a better word—a predictability about him, which can be dramatically, incredibly boring. But at the same time, he’s pulling the situations. He’s got to stand back and watch things be made a mess of, and then gently take over.”
Gently…or in the case of what we’ve seen in the Season 6 trailer, picking up Longclaw and leading the charge. The only question is if Melisandre will be leading the charge alongside him, and for how long?