"I’m visiting in mid-October, halfway through the production of the fourth series.......
Many will have to adapt to survive, but not Tywin Lannister. If anything, the great puppet master will harden his position as the most ruthless man in Westeros. The prospect amuses Charles Dance.
“I can’t help but laugh at Tywin, he’s enormous fun,” says Dance with a chuckle that is as foreign as Kit Harington’s cigarette. “There is the usual number of challenges for him [this year] and he rises to them in his own inimitable way. You’re in for a treat with season four.”
Unlike the less experienced cast members, the 67-year-old hasn’t looked at the original texts, preferring instead to trust the scripts sent to him each year. “With each successive season I look at what David and Dan are writing and say ‘My God, really?’ Tywin is pretty bloody awful. There was a time when I thought he had some redeeming features but now I think they’re only very superficial ones. He probably feels the cold from time to time, but that’s about it.”
When Dance speaks, I see the levels on my Dictaphone jump, his sonorous voice rippling up the walls and around the ceiling like a creeping fire. He speaks with the same theatrical cadence as Tywin, with a slight irritation and a hint that if I were to ask a particularly stupid question he would have a henchman disembowel me while he examined his nails.
In a universe of make-believe, Tywin’s Machiavellian wickedness is utterly convincing, but a lot of what Dance says is actually rather lovely. He’s never worked on anything so large and elaborate, nor did he think it would be possible for TV to be regarded as equal or even superior to film. He is effusive about Belfast and speaks fondly of his fellow cast, reserving special praise for Maisie Williams (Arya Stark, “It was like working with someone who’d been doing the job for 30 years”) Jack Gleeson (the despicable Joffrey Lannister, “He’s the sweetest guy”) and Peter Dinklage, his on-screen son, Tyrion: “I’m so fond of him, he’s a terrific guy, wonderful to work with, a fantastic actor. I love him dearly and I just have to apologise after every scene – I treat him like shit. It’s awful.”
When it’s time to wrap things up I want to tell this embodiment of evil that he’s nowhere near as scary in real life as I always feared. When I saw Last Action Hero as a ten-year-old, Dance’s bombastic baddie Benedict had scared the crap out of me. Few of his roles in the intervening 20 years – especially Tywin – have done much to ease my suspicions that he is, on some level, a real villain. I stumble over my words trying to explain this to him, but he interrupts with a hearty handshake: “Bugger off you silly sod – I’m an actor.”.....(aboutactorcharlesdanceblogspot.fr)
http://jamielafferty.com/got-milked/
2°)from an interview with actor Laurence Boxhall
The 17-year-old plays an underage soldier in the Foxtel mini-series, which completed filming in SA last week, and says there were times he had to pinch himself on set.
“One year out of school and going on set and having lunch and there’s Charles Dance eating a baguette in the corner...that’s a surreal moment,” he laughs
