English actor Charles Dance has been alone in quarantine for a while, probably catching up on TV like the rest of us. Dance has a long career, but is best known recently for playing the indomitable Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones. Speaking to The Times, he looked back on how the show gave his career “a kick up the arse,” and what he thought of the controversial series finale.
“Beyond 60 work begins to thin out,” Dance said. “To get another break like that . . . None of us knew at the outset how successful Game of Thrones would be because the pilot wasn’t very well received. But they put more money into it and then produced this extraordinary series.”
He’s right about the initial pilot for the show not going over well. We’ll probably never get to see that footage, but it was bad enough for HBO to mandate reshoots. Those worked out much better, and the rest is history.
And then came the finale, “The Iron Throne,” where Jon Snow kills Daenerys Targaryen and the remaining great lords of Westeros (and some other people) elect Bran Stark to be their king. Watching it at home, Dance admitted that he was “disappointed” in the way things went. “I stuck with it because I wanted to know how all these storylines were going to come together. But then for it all to end up with a kind of committee. I thought, ‘No, actually.’”
I would love to get more of his thoughts on that, and what exactly about the the “committee” electing Bran offended him, but you don’t ask Tywin Lannister to explain himself; you just accept what he says and walk away glad he didn’t dress you down.
Dance may give us a clue when he compares Game of Thrones to The Jewel in the Crown, a British miniseries that attracted a lot of hype back in the ’80s. When he rewatched it, he realized how much television had changed since then. “I thought, ‘My God, this is slow!’ Scenes were allowed to play out, you know? Now, the way things are put together, it’s cut very, very quickly.”
The final season of Game of Thrones was criticized for zipping through its story, so perhaps that’s what irritated Dance about the way it wrapped up.
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