Interview in The Times...for subscriber

pic from the interviewer Damian Whitworth
https://twitter.com/Damwhit

April 8 2014

I am standing in Charles Dance’s living room having a nice chat when he suddenly picks up what appears to be a walking stick from the table and pokes it at my chest. “If you were in the street and I did this,” he says, “your natural instinct would be to grab hold of it.” I seize the stick as he suggests, and in a deft movement he whips back his arm and pulls a sword from what I now see is a scabbard. The tip of the rapier-like blade is at my neck and I am staring into the gimlet eyes of Tywin Lannister.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/tv-radio/article4056776.ece

 

Anyone who watched Game of Thrones last night knows exactly what happens when an exquisite blade like this is pointed at a fleshy, unguarded neck like mine. It is slowly inserted and the victim spurts and splutters to death. Dance’s character is a singularly unpleasant piece of work and for two or three seconds it is deeply disconcerting to be facing the chilly Lannister stare. Then Dance smiles, lowers his arm and invites us to admire the craftsmanship of his Napoleonic-era sword stick. “Look at this, darling,” he murmurs to the PR woman from HBO. He strokes a groove running down his blade: “a nice channel to let the blood flow.”

The fourth season of Game of Thrones opened with a scene in which Dance forged two new swords from a greatsword of legendary Valyrian steel captured from his decapitated enemy Eddard Stark. Dance’s character, the ruthless patriarch of the Lannister clan, has been a substantial supporting presence but in this season he moves to centre stage.

Dance was catapulted to fame in the 1980s playing the dashing intelligence officer Guy Perron in the television adaptation of Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown. He has rarely been off our screens since, from romancing Greta Scacchi in the 1987 film White Mischief to latterly playing lots of baddies, including in the forthcoming The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the cryptographer Alan Turing, in which “I don’t treat Alan Turing very well”. At the age of 67 he is receiving worldwide exposure like never before as part of what he accurately describes as the Game of Thrones global phenomenon.

For those who have yet to be hooked by the epic tales of dragons and skullduggery in the Seven Kingdoms, Lannister is the power behind the throne: grandfather of the sadistic King Joffrey, and a brutal operator who will do whatever it takes to maintain the status of his family. “Not a very nice man. I wouldn’t want to spend much time in his company,” says Dance. Surely he must have met people like him in the movie industry. He ponders. “I’ve met powerful alpha males but none as charmless as Tywin Lannister. He keeps whatever emotional bits of him there are very much under wraps.”

The scenes involving the Lannisters are the best, especially when they involve Dance - all gravitas and flashes of danger - and the wonderful, Golden Globe awardwinning Peter Dinklage, who plays his dwarf son. Dinklage has the best lines and suffers some of the worst treatment from his father. “I treat poor Peter Dinklage like s***,” says Dance cheerfully. “I spend a lot of time apologising. ‘Horrible, lecherous stump’ I call him at one point.”The role has brought him recognition wherever he goes, whether he is in London, South Africa or Australia. On the whole “the fans are pretty bloody good” but phone cameras have meant constant intrusion. “Sometimes I say yes and sometimes I tell them to f*** off,” he says, channelling pure Tywin Lannister. The hapless selfie-seekers who get Lannistered are generally those who don’t ask nicely. “People stop five feet away and say, ‘Yeah, it’s him isn’t it?’ as if you are behind a piece of glass and you are deaf and blind. It is quite extraordinary.”

As a 1980s heart-throb Dance was forever taking his shirt off, but he doesn’t think he is lined up for any of the ubiquitous Game of Thrones nude scenes. He was astonished by the extent and the style of the sexual couplings when he saw the early episodes. “All this rumpy-pumpy and it was all doggy fashion. I said to David and Dan [the executive producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss]: ‘Has the missionary position not come into being in the Seven Kingdoms?’ They said: ‘We wanted it to be quite animalistic, Charles.’ I was quite amazed by it,” he says.

He is 6ft 3in and looks lean and fit for 67, which he attributes to early morning swimming at the unheated Parliament Hill Lido, followed by the “full cardiac-arrest breakfast”. Recently the women’s shower was not working and the ladies had to shower with the men. “One woman in there said: [adopts Cockney accent] ‘I’ll tell all my friends I had a shower with Charlie Dance this morning.’ ” Dance believes the balance of power in television drama has shifted across the Atlantic. “It’s an odd situation now. People used to talk about British television being the envy of the world. That’s not the case anymore. I am afraid it has a lot to do with resources.” HBO lavishes tens of millions of dollars on each series of Game of Thrones. Is that reflected in the actors’ salaries? “We are often referred to as white Mexicans by Americans in the industry in America. We are well paid, but not as well paid as if we were making the series in America. The rates are higher over there. I am not complaining, but proportionately we would be getting an awful lot more.”His townhouse is tastefully and comfortably furnished with rugs, books and lots of paintings and theatrical and cinematic photographs and posters. There is no flashy kitchen or statement furniture, though he is proud of the artificial grass he has had installed in the garden. He explains that there are six levels of quality ranging from the Brixton (this is a little joke) up to the Mayfair. And which is this, I ask. He looks slightly taken aback. “The Mayfair!” Dance is an old-school actor with a rich, not-too-fruity baritone, and a habit of calling everyone darling. When he later leaves me a phone message to clarify a point I even get an “old darling”. He lavishes praise on the actors who play his on-screen family. Dinklage is “such a delightful guy and a wonderful actor. He must be the envy of every dwarf actor in the world. Parts like that don’t come along for normal-sized people let alone guys with dwarfism, but he is such a talented guy, very good looking. That head is David, it really is; he has this thick, wonderful hair and this terrific face, beautifully expressive eyes.” Lena Headey, who plays his daughter, Cersei, has “such a beautiful face. Very clever; such a good actress.”

He is not so forthcoming about his real-life family. His marriage to Joanna, a sculptor, ended after 33 years more than decade ago. They have two grown -up children: Oliver, who works in the film industry “on the other side of the camera”, and Rebecca, who works for a woman who makes couture dresses. He now has a two-year-old daughter, Rose, with Eleanor Boorman, an artist in her forties. Rose is “absolutely adorable and, like her mother, very beautiful”. Other than that he won’t say anything and I get a steady, chilly stare. I say that it feels like he would reach for his sword of Valyrian steel if it were to hand and he makes a noise in the back of his throat that suggests that, yes, that is exactly what he’d do. He has had a number of relationships with women considerably younger than him, including the actress Sophia Myles and former model Shambhala Marthe. He goes off the record to express his pithy opinion of the papers that pursued him over his private life.

We move to safer territory. Wasn’t he supposed to have been Diana, Princess of Wales’s favourite actor? He met her a few times but says: “I don’t know if I was her favourite actor. She was wonderful. Very flirtatious, quite delightful.” Any late night calls summoning him to Kensington Palace? “No, I wasn’t secreted in the boot of her car or anything like that.”

Although Dance has a face that belongs on a Roman coin and is cast as aristocrats and leaders and commanding villains, his background was “quite the reverse. It’s just the way my face is put together. This business is all about looks and this is the face I have got and it looks rather patrician. God knows how because I am not at all aristocratic.” His father died when he was 4 and his mother, who worked mostly in service in houses in the West Country, subsequently married the lodger. “She died just after Jewel in the Crown. I think she was quite pleased,” he says quietly.

He has done a lot of films, including Alien 3, Last Action Hero with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gosford Park. He was “fourth villain from the left” in the Roger Moore James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only and when Timothy Dalton relinquished the Bond role Dance was asked to audition. His agent told him not to. “She might have been right,” he says. “I don’t know that it would have ruined my career but I am not sure I was right anyway.”

In recent years he has been the unpleasant lawyer Tulkinghorn in Bleak House and a devious chief whip in Secret State. He gets a lot of bad guys. “Yeah, rather too many probably. I used to play romantic leading men,” he says a touch wistfully. “Now I get these bastards most of the time, but that’s all right. I just like working.”

He’d like to go back to the RSC if it was the right part, but he hasn’t done a play for a few years and is remarkably candid about the fear that can grip stage actors. “The nerves never go away. You start feeling sick about lunchtime and there are some days when you think, ‘I hope there is going to be a bomb scare and they will cancel the show tonight.’ It’s fantastic when the show goes well and there’s a few hundred people applauding and thinking you are wonderful and our egos have been stroked. There are also those nights when you try to get through it as best you can.”

A few years ago, starring as C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands, he got halfway through the opening speech and realised he was making a mess of it and briefly left the stage. “I thought: ‘Come on. Not good enough. F*** off, come back on.’ And I did. If - God forbid - that ever happens again, I hope I have the nerve to do the same thing.” He adds: “I love being in front of the camera. I love the medium.” He certainly knows what is needed to look his best. The Times photographer is given advice on which lens to use and where to place his reflector to enhance the light.

At Greenwich this month he has been filming The Great Fire, an ITV drama about the blaze of 1666 that also stars Game of Thrones actress Rose Leslie and involves “periwigs and poncing about like Elton John on a bad day”. Next month he’s back on location in Belfast and Dubrovnik filming next year’s Game of Thrones. This season we can expect it to get “darker, more violent, sexier”.

He hasn’t read George R. R. Martin’s books on which the series are based but he knows what happens to his character. “People who have read the books stop me in the street and tell me.” He laughs. I am not sure that this is because he is thinking of the fate of Tywin Lannister or those fans who then make the mistake of trying to take a photograph without asking.

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From the Evening Standard
Game Of Thrones star Charles Dance: Now I’m older I only play villains not heart-throbs

Charles Dance has said being in Game Of Thrones has gained him an enthusiastic fan base — even though he plays a villain.
 The 67-year-old star, pictured as Tywin Lannister in the fantasy drama, said he is no longer asked to play heart-throbs now he is older.

But as the fourth series goes on air, the father-of-three added that he was happy to be a bad guy in the HBO show, saying its popularity had been “extraordinary”.

Dance, who shot to fame in the Eighties playing Guy Perron in the ITV drama Jewel In The Crown, said: “I used to play romantic leading men.  “Now I get these bastards most of the time, but that’s alright. I like working.”

He told The Times his fans were “bloody good”, but added camera phones meant “constant intrusion”.

http://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/game-of-thrones-star-charles-dance-now-im-older-i-only-play-