“Hey, they were in Game of Thrones”—Where else have you seen these 55 GoT cast members? (Part 2)

13) MICHAEL McELHATTON

Veteran Irish actor and screenwriter Michael McElhatton played Roose Bolton, a man who only avoids the title of Most Despicable Man Alive because his son Ramsay is even worse. Game of Thrones fans will always remember him as a key player in one of the most shocking scenes in the show’s history, the Red Wedding, where he stabbed Robb Stark and delivered an iconic line: “The Lannisters send their regards.”

In an interview with Accessonline, McElhatton talked about why discarding the A Song of Ice and Fire books was necessary as he prepared for the role:

"It kind of is a bit of a double-edged sword. I did read the first two books and kind of did lots of work before it and then realized that the way they’d (Benioff and Weiss) written Roose Bolton was very, very different to the character in the books actually. … He’s a creepier character. He has a very soft, whispery voice … that’s not the way he was written in the scripts and I couldn’t play him [as written in the book] because it just wouldn’t have worked. So, I felt I wouldn’t read any more of the books. I had to make my character really from the scripts and from the dialogue that was given to me . . ."

McElhatton has been working as an actor since 1990. His movie credits include I Went Down (1997), Intermission (2003), Perrier’s Bounty (above, 2009, with Thrones co-worker Francis Magee), Death of a Superhero (2011), Mammal (2016),The Siege of Jadotville (2016), King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword (2017) and Justice League (2017).

He has plenty of TV work under his belt, too. He’s been on shows like Paths to Freedom (2000), Fergus’s Wedding (2002), Hide & Seek (2006), Your Bad Self (2010), Titanic: Blood and Steel (2012, with fellow Thrones costars Ian McElhinney and Liam Cunningham), Ripper Street (2013) and Genius (2017, below).

Look for McElhatton’s distinctive voice in the oddly-titled animated feature Captain Morten and the Spider Queen in 2018.