When Game of Thrones fans mobbed Liam Cunningham as he was buying underwear

Things were nuts at the height of Game of Thrones fever. “[T]here’s 30 people trying to get around [security] while I’m trying to buy a pair of underwear. Unbelievable.”

Two years out from the series finale, Game of Thrones has died down, but it wasn’t that long ago that the cast members of this show were treated like Elvis come back from the dead, swarmed wherever they went by fans eager to know what happened next.

By all accounts, the attention was particularly intense in Spain, where Game of Thrones did a fair share of filming. And it wasn’t just headlining actors like Kit Haringing and Emilia Clarke who got this treatment. Speaking on The Laughs Of Your Life podcast with Doireann Garrihy, Liam Cunningham — who played Stannis Baratheon’s right-hand man Davos Seaworth — remembered how crazy it could get.

“There is nowhere you can go. We were filming in Spain and the fans broke into the hotel and were running around the corridors banging on doors trying to get to us. We had to fly additional security out,” Cunningham remembered. “I was trying to buy — as we call them on the North side — a pair of jocks in Bilbao and I remember walking out the door and the security jumping up. He was an ex-cop from Northern Ireland, Steve. He’s a lovely guy. He said where are you going? I replied, I’m just going to the shop’. He said, ‘I’ll come with you’. I said, ‘You’re not coming with me’ but he said, ‘I have to’. I said, ‘Steve, I’m going across the road to buy underwear, I do not want security.’ He said ‘Look, I’ll just come with you.’”

"I was in H&M, 50 feet across the road, perusing my trunks and I look around and Steve is standing with his arms open wide as if he is on the cross and there’s 30 people trying to get around him while I’m trying to buy a pair of underwear. Unbelievable. Spain was nuts. Here’s the bizarre thing, when you have to run out of bars in countries you have never been in before."

Happily, Cunningham lives in Dublin, where people are far less impressed with him. “They don’t give a sh*** here. It’s great,” he said.

"I do like the healthy begrudgery. There is a philosophy in Dublin is that you’ve either robbed someone, you’ve bought a lottery ticket and got lucky, or something happened by mistake. They don’t assume anything is earned. You were just in the right place at the right time. Nobody is competent enough to be successful. You’re jammy and you got lucky. And in a sense, they’re right."

Whatever works.

Incidentally, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon starts filming in Spain next month. We’ll see if history repeats itself.

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h/t Dublin Live