Liam Cunningham is currently appearing in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, based on the chapter from Dracula where the famous vampire stows away on a boat going from Transylvania to England, picking off the crew members one by one. Cunningham, who played voice-of-reason Davos Seaworth on Game of Thrones, plays the captain of the doomed ship.
“The attraction for me was that there are no movie stars in it — everybody’s actors,” Cunningham told Variety. “Almost all of us were from theater backgrounds and yet Amblin had the bravery not to need a marquee name. It’s not a cheap movie, you can see the money on the screen. And that immediately brings, to my opinion, a certain amount of confidence, that they’re gonna get behind something like this and want to make it well, because they didn’t take the easy route.”
"The thing that tops the plot is always the characters. And there are wonderful characters in the movie. You’ll really feel for these guys, because they’re not heroes. They’re not military men. They’re working men, they’re blue collar guys, who have one of the most horrendous literary monsters ever invented on a ship that they can’t get away from. And in it you’ve got the makings of something really interesting."
Liam Cunningham is “very proud” of the work everyone did on Game of Thrones
Cunningham, who apparently lives blocks from where Dracula author Bram Stoker lived in Dublin, may not be a full-fledged movie star, but he’s not an anonymous bit player, either. There’s no way he could star on Game of Thrones for seven of eight seasons and not become a face at least some people recognize.
“It not only was one of the most beautiful jobs I’ve ever done and was beautifully written, it was just a fantastic character,” Cunningham said. “It just gave me a little bit of security, which was most definitely new to me as a jobbing, strolling actor. It obviously raised my profile and all that sort of thing. It’d be probably written on my gravestone because it was a cultural phenomenon, it exceeded just becoming a very good television program, which nobody knew would happen, it was the audience that obviously did that. But when you’re part of a cultural phenomenon, it’s difficult to shake, I don’t want to shake it, I’m very proud of the work I did, and very proud of everybody else that was in it. And the ensemble thing, I’m a big fan of that, because it’s most difficult to write for, because they take the most amount of effort.”
Cunningham was hired onto Game of Thrones by creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss, who have a new show coming up…
Liam Cunningham’s character in 3 Body Problem is nothing like Davos
Cunningham is one of a few Game of Thrones veterans whom Benioff and Weiss have recruited to appear in 3 Body Problem, a sci-fi series based on the groundbreaking series by Liu Cixin. (John Bradley, who played Sam, will also appear.) The series is about what happens when humans make first contact with aliens from a distant star system…and then have to prepare for their arrival.
Cunningham will play Thomas Wade, an intelligence operative who is apparently very different from Davos. “He’s an extraordinary individual,” Cunningham said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve played anything close to this guy. I suppose the irony is what they wanted me to do was nothing like what they wanted me to do in Game of Thrones. He was seen as a soft moral compass kind of character in Game of Thrones — that’s not Wade. He’s going to be a bit of a shock for people who think I play one kind of character, shall we say? He’s a bit of a handful is Mr. Wade. And he’s involved in the intelligence community. It’s very much grounded in theoretical physics and quantum entanglement and all sorts of scientific pursuits. However, there are those people that we come across at the beginning of the show, come into the circle of Mr. Wade’s business, which are most definitely not scientific.”
3 Body Problem is due out on Netflix in January of next year.
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