One of the great joys of watching Game of Thrones is seeing the quality of the actors they consistently get for many of the roles. It’s still amazing to me that Charles Dance agreed to do GoT and Dance has always spoken about how much he loved working on the show, and how much he loved working with Peter Dinklage and Lena Headey in particular. Sean Bean has always talked about his love of the show too, so much so that he would be all for coming back for a cameo or something. Personally, I’ve always had a great deal of affection for Stephen Dillane. He’s usually cast as the posh types in British films and TV shows, and seeing him play the charisma-vacuum that was Stannis Baratheon was a great joy. He was at times heart-breaking, brutal, needy, crazy and terrible. It was an excellent performance over the course of four seasons. But Dillane, it seems, never really “got” the show, nor did he really care for the work. Sad.
Speaking to French magazine Liberation about his time on the fantasy series, Dillane’s words were translated as follows:
‘“I do not regret having done Game of Thrones, but I have nothing to say. I understood neither the series nor its success when I was attending. The experience was very strange, it passed under my nose. For a role like it to me, I must get interested could, which was not really the case. I was a bit overwhelmed.” Why, then, it be undertaken? Long silence, increasingly exasperated. “Among other things, for the money.”’
In this interview, he apparently also confirmed (SPOILER) that he’s not returning for the new season in any form, whether by corpse, ghost or icy vampire. He also said that GoT was “difficult because it is a big machine.” I can sort of understand that argument – Stannis was one of the few characters going far and wide throughout Westeros, and Dillane probably got tired of the weird hours and travel. That being said, it’s sad that he doesn’t think much of the series or of his work on the show, because he was outstanding.
Photos courtesy of HBO/GoT.
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