The Mountain breaks another strength record, Game of Thrones actors take the stage, and more

Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (Gregor “the Mountain” Clegane) has broken another world strength record. It’s just kind of what he does at this point.

His latest triumph came during the Italian Guinness World Records TV show, when he challenged current World’s Strongest Man Zydrunas Savickas to see who could carry two refrigerators over a 20-meter distance the fastest. That’s probably the strongman equivalent of a normal, puny human challenging a friend to see who can sink more balls of paper into a trash can from several feet away. This is way more interesting to watch on TV, though.

I like that Björnsson was introduced wearing a blood-red cape like he’s a superhero. The Icelandic flag onesie helped sell the illusion. Anyway, Björnsson hauled the almost 1,000-pound fridges across the finish line in just 19.6 seconds, beating Savickas and setting a new world record. The next time we write about him, we fully expect him to turn back time for forcing the Earth to rotate the other way.

Elsewhere, Game of Thrones veterans Ian McElhinney (Barristan Selmy) and Owen Teale (Alliser Thorne) are appearing onstage together in a production of the classic play Gaslight in Toronto. CBCNews caught up with the actors, who never shared a scene on Thrones, and asked about the late-in-life fame the show has afforded them. “It’s weird…I’ve been an actor for a long time and you can walk around more or less anonymously,” said McElhinney, 67. “And then you do something like this and you realize ‘Oh, I’m not as anonymous as I thought I was.'”

McElhinney and Teale in costume for Gaslight. (Mirvish/Michael Wharley))

Teale, for one, is enjoying it. “I have decided to embrace [the new lack of anonymity],” he said. “I stop and talk to people wherever I am, [even] if they jump out of restaurants with a knife saying ‘For the Watch!'”

Well, that’s gotta be annoying. Still, fame can be good for business. McElhinney brought up the time Benedict Cumberbatch played Hamlet in a production of Shakespeare’s tragedy at the Barbican Centre in London. “There were loads of people going to that that were going because they were fans of [Sherlock] or fans of him specifically,” he said. McElhinney didn’t think he and Teale would provide that same kind of draw for their production of Gaslight (“We’re too old for that!”), but it couldn’t hurt.

It opens Sunday at the the Ed Mirvish Theatre in Toronto and runs through February 28.

Finally, as long as we’re talking about actors who play Night’s Watchmen, Brian Fortune (First Builder Othell Yarwyck) is at the center of a new music video from Irish alt-pop duo Heathers. We’re not sure if Heathers cast him based on his role in Thrones, but check out those shots of running through the snow around 1:50—put him in a different outfit and he could be running through the haunted forest.

We might just be reading into this too much, but the chorus puts us in mind of Game of Thrones, too, particularly what’s happening up at the Wall. “Oh, you left me in the cold of the winter. When the skies were heavy, I was out on my own. Oh, you left me in the cold of the winter. When my heart was heavy, you were gone, gone, gone.”

Call it Othell’s lament for being part of the Jon Snow murder brigade. Yeah, we’re definitely reading too much into this. It was good!