Game of Thrones veteran Pilou Asbæk reflects on his time as Euron Greyjoy, the most arrogant dragon-slayer on the high seas.
Game of Thrones produced some memorable villains in its time. There was the hateful boy king Joffrey Baratheon, the psychopathic Ramsay Bolton, the homicidally proud Cersei Lannister, the unknowable Night King…next to them, the mad pirate Euron Greyjoy is perhaps the junior partner, but actor Pilou Asbæk still made the most of the time he was given, swaggering across the screen in his salt-stained coat and taking down one of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons before he made like a Game of Thrones character and died.
And he was hands-on as an actor, making requests of showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss about how to play the character. “I said, ‘So you guys have written him like this. Would you mind if I made the costumes a little bit more swag, a little bit more like Keith Richards? I don’t mean in expression, I mean in he doesn’t give a shit,’” he told The Times.
Oddly enough, this is literally the exact same strategy that Johnny Depp used while playing Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and hey, it more or less worked out for him.
All that said, no matter what Asbæk did, Euron was always the least developed of the human villains on the show. He was also pretty far afield of the version of Euron George R.R. Martin gives us in A Song of Ice and Fire, who has all kinds of villainous accoutrement, including an eyepatch, a drug addiction, and a possible history of inflicting child abuse.
“o I wish my character was a little bit closer to the books?” Asbæk said. “Do I wish my character had a little bit more screen time? F**k, yes, it’s the biggest show in the world. You want to be the lead. But that’s not the job. The job is to do the character and not what your ego tells you to do.”
Asbæk will be returning to HBO later this year in The Investigation.
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h/t Metro