Charles Dance speaks about Tywin
Game Of Thrones’ Charles Dance speaks
exclusively to SciFiNow about getting to the heart of Tywin Lannister in
Season 2 of HBO’s fantasy epic.
Introduced in episode seven of GoT Season
1, the powerful Lannister patriarch Tywin stepped in to try and clean
up the mess caused by the escalating Stark/Lannister feud. The icy lord
of Castery Rock calmly and methodically skinning a deer as he put Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) in his place.
“It took me two days to get the smell of that off my hands actually,”
laughed actor Charles Dance at the launch party for the Complete First
Season DVD/Blu-ray. “I thought they would have given me a haunch of
venison to take home, but they didn’t. It was fun.”
As the war heats up and Tywin settles into the role of commander and
power behind the Iron Throne in Season 2, we’ll start to get a better
idea of what makes this master manipulator tick.
“You see a little of what’s behind the rather austere exterior,
actually,” teases Dance, “that’s he’s not quite the bastard that you
think he is.”
With memorable genre roles in Alien3, Last Action Hero and
Sky’s recent Terry Pratchett adaptations where he plays the equally
patrician, er, Patrician under his belt, Charles Dance shrugs off the
suggestion that there’s any pressure in embodying this complex figure.
“There’s no pressure at all, not at all, why should there be
pressure?” he says playfully. “I walk on a set and pretend to be
somebody else, and hopefully I do it convincingly.
“We seem to be battling weather a lot of the time,” the actor
continues, “but we’re going to start earlier this year I think, because
last year and the year before, we ran into an awful lot of snow, very
cold and wet. There aren’t any huge challenges really, it’s just great
fun to do.
Game Of Thrones Season 2 begins April 2 on Sky Atlantic HD.
http://www.scifinow.co.uk/interviews/game-of-thrones-season-2-the-truth-about-tywin-lannister/
But the other one was that fantastic scene where
Charles Dance (as Tywin Lannister) guts and flays a stag while he talks with
his son. How did Dance react when he found out that was part of the deal?
Benioff: He did not bat an eye.
Weiss: He made it seem as if he had been skinning stags
his entire life.
Benioff: I mean we were sitting there watching him do
this and it's an incredibly difficult scene not just because it's a long scene
and he's got so much dialogue to perform as effortlessly as he does. But continuity-wise,
he has to be skinning the same part of the animal at the same moment of the
speech each time otherwise we won't be able to cut it together. And he did that
and made it look like he had been hunting stags since he was three.
He's just a phenomenal actor and he's one of those people who from the
beginning, I think Dan was the first one who said, have you seen, was it Bleak
House?
Weiss: Yeah.
Benioff: And said you've gotta check him out, he'd be
perfect for Tywin Lannister. And we were both in complete agreement, there was
never another choice for that role. He was so completely perfect for it.
And that was a scene - you know it's not a scene in the book but we loved
writing it, because first of all, these two actors – you never get to see them
together and it felt like a gap that we could fill and have this wonderful
scene show a little bit how the son got to be this way and what his
relationship with his father was. It let us learn some more about these
characters and also introduce this character Tywin Lannister in this really
dramatic way.
And across the board with lots of these characters in the books George has
the luxury of telling stories about people and telling little pieces of back
story and … if we were to do that we would be committing ourselves to all sorts
of ungainly flashbacks that work better on page than they do in filmed
entertainment so we needed to come up with new ways to introduce these
characters in the moment of the story that was actually unfolding before us
that served the same function as flashback and back story bits and pieces that
George peppers throughout his books.
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