Game of Thrones showrunners discourage reading the books, per Iain Glen

It’s no secret that many of the cast members on Game of Thrones haven’t read George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire novels. Gwendoline Christie is a self-professed superfan who’s read the books, and it’s been implied that Ian McElhinney (Barristan Selmy, gods rest his soul) read them as well. By and large, though, the actors have steered clear. According to a recent interview with Iain Glen, that may be by design.

Glen admitted that he read the first book in the series, A Game of Thrones, just to get a feel for what was going to happen in the first season. Beyond that, he heeded word from up top:

"[T]he writers themselves, David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss], they didn’t particularly want actors coming to the scripts from the book, always suggesting what the book did and how it was different – I could see the glazed look in their eyes when that happened…They were quite happy for us to move forward and treat them as screenplays with no history, so that’s the reason why I only ever read the first novel."

That’s understandable. It’s gotta be annoying to have spent the time and effort thinking through what you want to keep and what you want to cut from the source material, writing a script, and then getting fact-checked once shooting starts and it’s too late to change anything. In any case, now that the show has officially moved beyond the novels, this probably isn’t much of an issue anymore. No matter what the cast members may read, they can’t predict what’s coming any more than we can.

I think this comes back to the ongoing tension between those who think the show should be a reflection of the books and those who think they should be separate entities. George R.R. Martin, for the record, is in the latter camp. “There has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material, by and large,” he once wrote on his Not A Blog, “but the longer the show goes on, the bigger the butterflies become. And now we have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms…Prose and television have different strengths, different weaknesses, different requirements.”

As much as the Game of Thrones showrunners were criticized over this past season for deviating from the books, few of the complaints were lobbed at the performances, so many the producers have the right idea here.

To round out the interview, Glen talked about his hopes for Jorah’s future. “I just want Jorah to be there when Daenerys finally succeeds in the end, and sits on the Iron Throne. I’d like to be beside her.” Good luck with that, greyscale-boy.

H/T RadioTimes.com

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