The top 15 best performances on Game of Thrones
Image: Game of Thrones/HBO
9. Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister
If you want to talk about commanding the screen, look no further than Charles Dance. Nobody has more presence than Tywin Lannister.
The show does a great job of building Tywin up before he appears onscreen. Cersei, Jamie, Tyrion, Robert, and others all bring him up, and based on how they talk about him we know that he’s not someone to be messed with. When we finally do meet him, he’s spellbinding. His first scene is him gutting and skinning a deer while discussing legacy and politics with his son. He drops one of his famous line in the first minute (“The Lion does not concern himself with the opinions of the sheep”). Dance delivers it with grit and power, showing why he’s perfect for the role. He always knows what’s going on, he’s a step ahead of you, and he knows exactly how to turn every circumstance to his advantage.
Charles Dance is perfectly cast in this role, playing a man consumed by his desire to continue his family legacy, even if his actual family is miserable. And yet he despises his son Tyrion, blaming him for his wife’s death, creating one of the show’s juiciest dynamics. This is part of what makes his death at Tyrion’s hands so interesting. “Did you really believe I’d let them kill you,” he asks. “You’re a Lannister!” We almost believe him. It’s hard to tell if this is another trick or if Tywin really did have some plan in store to free Tyrion at the last moment.
Tywin is feared and respected throughout Westeros for his ruthlessness, but he’s all but clueless about the internal lives of the people closest to him, proud to the point of ignoring Cersei when she tells him directly about her affair with Jaime. Dance plays these distant father figure tropes incredibly well; he’s annoyed with his children’s mistakes and insists that everyone play by his rules. And because he’s such a force to be reckoned with he almost gets his way, but in the end his lack of empathy does him in. We’re just glad we got to watch Dance play all of it.