The Last Kingdom’s Adrian Schiller talks Aethelhelm, season 5 and more

Adrian Schiller plays the scheming Aethelhelm on The Last Kingdom. How screwed is he for season 5? “You can’t murder people’s moms and get away with it.”

The Last Kingdom was recently renewed for a fifth season on Netflix, which means that Aethelhelm (Adrian Schiller) is primed to continue scheming to ensure his grandson ends up on the throne of England. Schiller sat down to chat with us about all things Last Kingdom, starting with why character was introduced in season 3:

"They needed to introduce another sort of elder statesman as it were. They had lost Odda, and obviously Alfred was unwell. So I think from the point of view of the plot, from the spectrum of characters, they needed to have these sort of older statesman figures in place. Not that I’m that old, but I’m older than anybody else (laughs). Also I think it’s the intrigue, sort of the court intrigue plot, isn’t it? There are the guys that are planning things, but generally the show’s much more action based. Uhtred will solve the problem in the end, by killing somebody, but that’s not quite my style. I just do a lot of planning and talking and scheming."

Every show needs a good schemer, but unlike many of them, Aethelhelm isn’t necessarily scheming to get power for himself, or at least, not just for himself.

“[Y]ou may sympathize with [his motivations] more or less, but Aethelhelm was brought in because he’s rich and because he’s got a big army,” Schiller told us. “Alfred understood that he needed the extra fighting men, and obviously the money is always useful. These things, they’re sort of like corporate mergers, marriages in medieval times. If you’re going to marry your daughter to a prince or an aetheling, then that’s a sort of corporate merger between the families. Aethelhelm’s aim is really quite simple; he wants his grandchildren to be kings of England. Which is not a terrible thing to want, just depends a little bit how you go about it, I suppose.”

Image: The Last Kingdom/Netflix

The Last Kingdom meets Game of Thrones

It’s no secret that The Last Kingdom draws a lot from real-life history, but Aethelhelm is an original creation. Still, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t share things in common with some other TV characters. “I think that he’s a bit House of Cards, you know?” Schiller said. “What I admire about him is he doesn’t really lose his cool. He’s always thinking, and if things do go wrong, then he’s very resourceful, he’ll find another way through. Obviously he’s a very cold man, he doesn’t have any great affection for his own daughter. I think his loyalty is pretty mercenary, really. So I don’t find those aspects very admirable, but I think he’s very intelligent. I think he’s very calm and very thoughtful; he plans several moves ahead. I think the only thing that he gets wrong is, sometimes he underestimates his opponents. He assumes he’s cleverer than they are, which is a mistake.”

Game of Thrones fans like myself might liken him to Tywin Lannister, but Schiller sees some key differences…and possibly gets him confused with Tyrion:

"Yeah, absolutely. But Aethelhelm doesn’t have the charm, Tywin was very funny as well. I’m afraid they don’t write me sufficient jokes. But also, Tywin liked his women and he liked his booze, and you don’t get the impression that Aethelhelm really enjoys himself very much. I don’t think it’s an endearing characteristic, he’s just so kind of single minded.  He doesn’t care who he hurts and those aren’t really attractive qualities (laughs). But I love playing him."

And while few would compare Edward with Joffrey, Aethelhelm does attempt to manipulate his monarch in much the same way Tywin did his, but with more mixed results. “I think that Aethelhelm still thinks that Edward is a boy that he can manipulate. Aethelhelm thinks he’s got a better hold on Edward than he really does have. Edward is very passionate, but he’s also intelligent, he knows when he’s being played or in the end, if he discovers he’s being played, he doesn’t like it. I think that is a mistake that Aethelhelm has made. Aethelhelm has come up against the the sharp edge of his tongue a couple of times by now, so he’s gonna have to take that a little bit more carefully.”

Image: The Last Kingdom/HBO

Aethelhelm vs Uhtred and Aelswith

Losing your influence or place at the king’s side is one thing, but come season 5, Aethelhelm could be in jeopardy of losing much more. “They were very, very lucky to get out of the problem with Sigtryggr. I don’t know this anymore than you do, but an awful lot will hinge on what happens with Lady Aelswith and whether anybody realizes the role I had to play in her being unwell. Will she die? Will she recover? If she recovers, will she work out what was wrong? If she works out what was wrong will she work out that I had anything to do with it? I think if Edward gets a sniff of the fact that it had anything to do with me, then that’s the end of the road. You can’t murder people’s moms and get away with it.”

Image: The Last Kingdom/Netflix

And if Aelswith doesn’t get Aethelhelm, Uhtred might. Who does Schiller see as the bigger enemy? “As I said before, I think he’s underestimated Uhtred. He thought he could beat him, by literally beating him, which, of course he didn’t. Aethelhelm is too conceited to believe that Uhtred could be as clever as he is. Whereas Uhtred obviously just plays a very different hand.”

"Aelswith I think he has learned he underestimated her originally, and I think he has learned that she’s a proper challenge to him, which is why he tried to kill her. He knows perfectly well that there are these other kids, he can see that Edward’s marriage with his daughter is falling apart and that he doesn’t favor the boy. So he’s got everything to play for. Jeppe (Haesten) and I, we we did joke that in the next season it would be kind of cool if we could team up as an anti-Uhtred team; to bring our armies together to defeat Uhrted, that would be kind of hilarious."

Aethelhelm and Haestan? We’re totally here for that oddball team up.

Behind the scenes of The Last Kingdom season 4

We also asked Schiller about his most difficult scene to film in season 4, and he pulled the curtain back on a little movie magic. “I think the some of the most fun stuff to do were the scenes when we were all locked up after Brida (Emily Cox) and Sigtryggr take Winchester,” he said. “That was great fun. I very much like doing the scenes with Emily, I think she’s fantastic. From more for an acting point of view, they were more challenging, although they weren’t necessarily dialogue heavy.”

"Technically speaking, the more difficult scenes are the big scenes were a lot of people are talking or everyone’s around the dinner table. Actually, there was a big scene that we did with the ealdormen in Mercia, which was a dinner scene, and for various reasons, one being my baby wasn’t very well, I had to come back to London in the middle of it all. You wouldn’t be able to tell, but some of it was shot without me being there and then some of it when I was there, the other lot weren’t there. You can’t tell, it’s just very well edited."

Next he’s gonna tell us the show really isn’t filmed in medieval England.

Peeling back the curtain just a little more, Schiller revealed how he landed the part of Aethelhelm in the first place. “I think it’s the way they go with a lot of these relatively long running shows now is, it’s sort of experimental. They didn’t actually audition me for this. They said, ‘we’ve got this new character that we’re bringing in, do you want to come and do it?’ I can’t remember exactly, but I think in the first place it was only going to be, like, two or three episodes. No, but that would be the end of it, just like we’re going to try it out. We’re gonna run it around the block and see how it works.”

"Obviously they liked the character and wove him in further and further. I think that’s very often the way, not just this show, but a lot of shows; they’ll probably plan out, you know, season one, season two before they start. After that, they’ve got to take the temperature of the audience, they’ve got to work out the storylines that they are engaged with and the ones that they care less about. They’ve got to work out which of their major characters they can keep, which they’re gonna dispose off. Then it starts to have a life of its own, yeah? So then you start bringing in new characters, new storylines and those experiments, and then it’s sort of generating itself rather than something that just got past the planning stage. I came in the middle of that. I’m glad to say that they carried on through into the next season. So it was all a bit of an experiment, and I don’t think anybody really knew exactly who he was before we started."

The Last Kingdom is based on a series of books by Bernard Cornwell, The Saxon Stories, but of course, once you’re adapting stuff for TV, things change.

Image: The Last Kingdom/Netflix

Speaking of experimenting, Schiller also talked about improvisation on set, once again revealing how sausage is made:

"One of the things that one learns, is sometimes you have a bit of dialogue or something, and it doesn’t feel quite right or it needs a bit of a tweak. But oftentimes when actors don’t really like whatever it is, that’s the bit that they need to solve. If they solve it, the whole thing works much, much better. Generally speaking the writers will give you stuff which may have some uncomfortable corners in it, or things which are a little bit difficult to say, and they’ve written like that for a reason. If you can find out what the reason is, you’re probably gonna do a better job, because actors aren’t writers, even if they are, that’s not their job in this particular place. What would actors will often do is they are just kind of soften it. They’ll make it a little bit the same because it’s not their skill set, that’s not a criticism, it’s just not what you’re supposed to be doing. So the vocabulary will decrease, and there’ll be more hesitations and ‘ums’,  people touching their face and scratching their arses."

But don’t think that Schiller isn’t appreciate of the writers’ work. “I could certainly recognize in the scripts in the last season that the writers definitely knew who Aethelhelm was,” he said. “There were forms of speech and so on, which just sounded like him.” That’s why, generally, he sticks to the script:

"A little bit of improvisation, like you say is OK, but it’s just better not to. If you could manage to do what they wrote, chances are it’s gonna be better than anything you come up with on the day. Scripts will go through processes and processes, and sometimes that can make things flatten a bit. But what it really means is that, maybe a couple of writers and three or four executive producers have really thought very, very hard about every bit of it. You start changing that and you’re changing weeks of work. What almost always happens if you say ‘Wouldn’t this be a good idea?’ They say all right, then we shoot it, and it never makes the edit (laughs)."

Finally, I had to ask Schiller for an embarrassing story from set — usually, these involve horses, but not always. “I’ve been racking my brains; I couldn’t think of anything sufficiently embarrassing,” he said. “I haven’t spent that much time on the horses, I don’t do an awful lot of riding around. I do remember that the little boy who plays my grandson (Marcell Zsolt Halmy), who was terribly sweet, in the middle of a very important scene, he farted very loudly. He was absolutely mortified, the little chap. Everyone thought it was hilarious and he just stared around with these huge eyes and we all had to say, ‘Oh no, it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright’.”

"Without being too personal about it, the last season I was quite often very preoccupied because my little boy wasn’t very well, he’s fine now, but I was always in a rush. I was always flying back to London. I must have spent so many hours on planes last year, it was ridiculous. So in a way, that whole period of time, my intense memories are to do with looking after my little boy. I have very fond memories of shooting, but there was a bit of a whirlwind,  all happening at the same time."

We appreciate Mr. Schiller thinking about this question in advance, and wish his boy nothing but the best.

Stay tuned for the second part of our interview!

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