HE died an ignominious death as Tywin Lannister in a recent episode of Foxtel’s most popular network series, Game of Thrones, but actor Charles Dance has surfaced in Adelaide, ready to wage a different kind of battle.
Here to play British commander-in-chief Sir Ian Hamilton in Deadline Gallipoli the famous British actor is unfazed by the success of the television series in which he died a sweetly vengeful death at the hands of his wrongly accused dwarf son.
“It comes in waves,” he says in his rich baritone voice. “In 1982 I did something called The Jewel in the Crown which was pretty successful, and that was a break for me. You have peaks and shallows and this is a peak, most definitely. It’s become a global phenomenon and I’m very glad to be part of it.”
In the Foxtel miniseries about Gallipoli war correspondents filming this week at Adelaide Studios, Dance will play the flawed British commander who proved ill-suited for a debilitating campaign on foreign soil.
In the series co-produced by nad starring Sam Worthington — Dance plays the general blamed for the massive loss of life on the Turkish peninsula.
“I’m playing the schmuck who carried the can for it,” says Dance.
He will be in Adelaide until mid-July and remembers the city from a visit more than a decade ago when he starred in the South Australian produced Black and White, a film about the trial of a young Aboriginal man accused of murder, Maxwell Stuart.
“It was about four or five weeks and we were living down at Glenelg,” he says. “I was brought up by the sea in England, in the south-west of Devon. The sea is very important to me.”