It’s hard to believe that any actor would refuse the opportunity to be on Game of Thrones, but it wasn’t always the behemoth it is now. Speaking to TheArtsDesk, Conleth Hill (Varys) admits that, although he now considers his time on the show some of the most rewarding of his life, at first he wasn’t sure about joining up.
"I resisted it for so long. Like a lot of people who haven’t got into it I went, ‘Oh God, dungeons and dragons, swords and sorcery, that’s now really my thing.’"
At the urging of his agent, Hill went to Belfast to audition anyway. He actually read for an entirely different role at first, which he didn’t get. Then they asked him to audition for Varys, and he just sort of went with the flow.
"I didn’t run at it and I hadn’t a clue in that first season. I just adopted the Linda Gray approach. In the first series of Dallas she didn’t have many lines and made the most of the screen time she had. There was a scene where Varys didn’t have any lines but they cut away to him and I just gave a couple of filthy looks, just to make the most of it. If it’s non-verbal it doesn’t mean it’s non-communicative."
Several years on, he doesn’t feel constrained by the role, in part because his character doesn’t have to take part in any of the show’s big battles, which require cast members to be on set for weeks at a time. “My fellow actors are up their oxters in mud and I just get to sit around a nice place and bitch with Peter Dinklage.”
Sounds like fun.
Hill is performing as George in a West End production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which is running at the Harold Pinter Theater from February 22nd to May 27th.
Cast Slap
Meanwhile, Ian McShane, who played the one-off character of Brother Ray in Season 6’s “The Broken Man,” also initially said “no” to Game of Thrones. In an interview with Collider, McShane admitted that when he was initially approached for a role, he said no, but only because he didn’t want to commit to s series. “When they told me it was a one-off character, I said ‘perfect.’ I’m bound to die.”
McShane can currently be seen onscreen as the enigmatic Winston in John Wick 2. When talking with Collider, he brought up the first movie, where Game of Thrones actor Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy) played the villain. According to McShane, Allen has “the most slappable face on screen.”
It’s not a slight against Allen’s acting abilities, as he says it with a smile, just a comment on his face. Some would agree Theon is quite slappable.
McShane also had some parting words for the Hound, who returns to camp in “The Broken Man” to find Ray, his friend, hanging from a tree, dead. “You know damn well he’s going to go off and murder everyone who murdered Ray but maybe after that he’ll have a few sort of qualms.”
We might see some of those qualms when season 7 airs this summer.