Jack Gleeson Finds Game of Thrones “Hard To Watch”

Jack Gleeson is back in the news. The reports that he turned down Hollywood to go start his own theater company sparked an interest in the 23 year old’s post-Thrones career. This suits Gleeson fine, since when you found your own start-up theater company, the best thing you can get for it is press. (He’s also taking a cue from Peter Dinklage, who has used his career on and off over the years to promote his own New York-based theater troupe.) But although Gleeson would like to talk about his new projects, what interviewers want to talk about (as always) is his time on Thrones, and how it feels to not be on the show anymore.

In talking to The Daily Beast, Gleeson admits that he doesn’t watch the show now that he’s moved on. It’s just too hard, although not for the reasons you’d think. It’s not because he’s too emotionally attached. It’s because he can’t get emotionally attached.

“You know the willing suspension of disbelief, it’s kind of hard to suspend, because you kind of know that the sets aren’t really real, and you kind of know that the actors aren’t really the characters—obviously people know that anyway, but you’re able to convince yourself more when you haven’t actually seen the thing in real life. So I find it hard to watch.”

Then there’s his own character, who often had to film sequences which were emotionally hard for him to go through—let alone watch back. Gleeson had some interesting things to say about Joffrey’s brutality, and the bigger issue of how Game of Thrones depicts violence toward women.

“[I]t’s a tricky thing when you are representing misogyny in that way because I wouldn’t say the show ever implicitly condones misogyny or any kind of violence towards women. But, perhaps, it’s still unfair or unjust to represent it even if the gloss on the representation is a negative one. Obviously as a 23-year-old man, I can never put myself into the mindset of a woman who has been sexually assaulted, but I think that sometimes you have to represent awful things happening onscreen even if they’re for entertainment because you have to expose the brutality of them, because the chances are you’re not going to see that anywhere. So there’s a chance it engages some kind of empathy but it is a gray area. It might be very traumatic and stressful to watch those scenes.”

“I think it’s always how you represent that kind of treatment: are you in some way making it cool or are you making it into an entertainment product, and is that wrong? Or are you doing it in order to expose the problem of sexual assault?”

It’s a surprisingly thoughtful analysis from someone many still look at and immediately see a monster who abused Sansa while laughing, or killed Ros for sport. But that’s partly why he’s so excited about his “Bears In Space“ project (which is more or less exactly what it sounds like)—it’s a chance to do something very different and unexpected.

“We’d like it to be that people will come to see the show not because I’m in it,” said Gleeson. “But because they want to see a fun hour, hour-and-a-half of entertaining theater. It does help to a certain extent but we always like it to succeed or fail on its own merits.”

Incidentally, his thoughts sound a little similar to those of Maisie Williams, who doesn’t want people buying tickets for The Falling, her British indie drama, just because she’s in it. It’s an issue pretty much all of the Game of Thrones cast members, particularly the young ones, will probably have to face at some point in their careers. Thrones has made them into names, but they can sustain their fame apart from it?

Of course, the inevitable question came up during Gleeson’s interview—does he know Jon Snow’s fate? He insists he’s as in the dark as the rest of the cast. When he asked Harington how many seasons he’s signed for, Harington refused to answer. “I was instantly exited from the group of secrecy so I’m in the dark just as much as everyone else.”