Conleth Hill appeared on Game of Thrones for all eight of its seasons as Varys, the conniving spymaster who served no less than four monarchs in the time we knew him: King Robert, King Joffrey, King Tommen and Queen Daenerys. Varys appeared at first to be an unctuous toady, but over time we learned that was a front and that he did indeed care about the good of the realm. By the time he exited the show, it was as an iconic, layered supporting charactered.
But it almost didn't happen. “I was resistant for a long time," Hill recently told The Irish Times. "I’m not into wizards.”
But ultimately, Hill was lured to the table. “I don’t think it was a typical casting call," he remembered. "They wanted people who could handle the language, who had done Shakespeare.” What ultimately swayed him was the content of his audition scene: a moment between Varys and Tyrion Lannister where Varys reveals that he was abused as a child.
Nothing like that happened in the first or second season of the show, but Game of Thrones revisited it in season 3, when Varys tells Tyrion all about how he was abused by a "sorcerer" when he was a kid...only to reveal that he'd had the sorcerer found and shipped to King's Landing in a box. The show leaves what happens next to our imagination. This has to be the scene that Hill was talking about, or some variation on it:
Visually, Varys was known for his bald head. To this day, people just getting into Game of Thrones are probably surprised to learn that, in reality, Conleth Hill has a full head of hair:
Since Game of Thrones, Hill has kept up his career with a large variety of roles in TV and film. He even got back together with Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss to play a simulated space alien pope in their new show 3 Body Problem. And if that description isn't enough to get you to check out 3 Body Problem on Netflix some time, I don't know what would.
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h/t NME