"Childhood’s End is more relevant now than in the 1950s," says Game of Thrones vet Charles Dance, who plays Karellen, the alien Overlord and self-proclaimed "Supervisor for Earth" who ushers in the new world order. "We human beings in 2015 are really f---ing things up with our wars, our politics and our pollution, and Clarke saw this happening over 60 years ago."
The author also predicted we’d be incapable of solving this hot mess. "Earthlings try to sort things out, but inevitably we make a pig’s ear of it, don’t we?" says Dance. "You can see why we’d be open to some superbeing coming down here to fix all our problems, since we clearly cannot do it ourselves."
So will Karellen’s appearance. During the alien takeover and for many years afterward, the Overlord does not reveal his true physical self in order to prevent world-wide panic. (You’ll understand why when we finally get a look at him at the end of Night 1!) Even Dance was unnerved when he saw himself under all the heavy Karellen prosthetics. "I fell asleep in the makeup chair and woke up four hours later, looked in the mirror and said, ‘My God!’" Dance recalls. "It was genuinely shocking—a brilliant piece of work by some very clever artists."
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"This was written in 1952, talking about a world of economic crises, wars, famine, here we are in 2015 and nothing’s changed," Dance told ComicBook.com during a recent in-person interview. "I thought there was a lot of resonance for us now, which was reason enough to do it."
"Exposition is a killer, it’s deadly. Whenever a television show or a film resorts to exposition, it’s because there are major flaws in the script. This doesn’t resort to exposition."
"I’ve never done anything that involved me being buried in layers of prosthetics," Dance said. "I thought it would be an interesting exercise, and indeed it was, in Melbourne at the hottest time of the year!"
"Karellen’s first appearance is really what I’m most excited for people to see," he said with a knowing grin. After spending most of the episode as a faceless voice, audiences will probably be anxious for it, as well.
At Xmas he cooks....give the guy a f...break with Tywin Lannister...he's promoting Childhood's End and Tywin is dead a season ago
listen here :
What attracted you to the role of Karellen in “Childhood’s End”?
- It’s a great story, which I was not familiar with. I’ve never been a fan of science fiction, but I certainly knew that Arthur C. Clarke was the godfather of sci-fi. So when I was offered it, I read the book and then the scripts came in and I thought, “These are really good adaptations of a very good story.” To bring humanity to a character that is not human is a pretty nice challenge to have. And I’d never worked with as much prosthetic as I’ve worked with
on this.
What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve been given?
“Know when you’re being bad.” In this business, we’re surrounded by wonderful darlings, and if you can find somebody who you believe in, who has the bravery to say to you, “Listen, that was not very good,” you’re very lucky. There are very few people around who will be able to do that, for fear, rightly, of offending you or upsetting you. Because we’re very fragile creatures, actors. But I think we do need to possess that facility to be objective.
There seems to be more fantasy and sci-fi shows than ever. Why is the genre so popular?
Principally because of the success of “Game of Thrones.” You know what this business is like — something seems to be successful, let’s try to do it again and again. With the advances of CGI and all the really rather clever things we can do, we’ve now given a lie to the phrase “the camera can’t lie.” Of course it can, hugely, tell the most awful porkies.
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