Game of Thrones - Julian Glover (Grand Maester Pycelle) Interview

Here's a brief, but quite nice interview from GameofThrones.Hu with one of the more under-appreciated actors in Game of Thrones, Julian Glover, who plays Grand Maester Pycelle.

They also have other interviews on their site with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister), Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen), Miltos Yerolemou (Syrio Forel) and Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) in English... as well as a few others in Hungarian.

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Thanks to Kate, the awesome woman behind FanFavourites, I've had the opportunity to interview most of the cast present at the FanFavourites event.

The second actor I approached was Julian Glover, who plays Grand Maester Pycelle. I almost didn't recognise him without the beard.

The interview may contains minor spoilers regarding the fate of Pycelle, so be advised.

GameofThrones.hu: How did you get the role? What made you want to get it?

Julian Glover: I didn't want to get it. I went up for another role, Peter Vaughan's, but they said no. And then they said 'Well I don't know, come in again, we'd be real interested'. So I had to learn the bloody thing all over again, but no, didn't get that one. But then they said 'Hey, come and read for this'. They saw hundreds of actors. And I got the part myself, thank you.

GameofThrones.hu: Grand Maester Pycelle is a much more subtle player in the game of thrones than the others – do you think that he's playing his own games or is he completely Cersei's creature?

Julian Glover: Oh, he's discovered a way of surviving, hasn't he? A very clever way, because nobody has noticed it. He had to make these decisions, cause he knows as well as our audience that he's up for the chop as well as anybody else, so he works out his demands (?), and it's wonderful that in the first series it wasn't even revealed until the end. So there's a long way to go for him.

And then in the second series, um... well, I suppose I shouldn't say... He, he gets seen with a woman, you know, this old man, really good, innit? But he's discovered and he's punished for doing something wrong, and then he comes out of prison at everybody's demands.

His life is... Basically his life has been dedicated to that particular family [the Lannisters], and it has been from the very beginning, and he didn't know that, he thought he was completely and utterly loyal to Eddard Stark, at least he seemed to be, and then you discover, aah, yeah... Not quite.

I went to the writers and they said 'You wait, you wait. Are you reading the books?', and I said 'No'. I never read the books with these things. I read the scripts as they are given to me, otherwise I start interfering, saying 'why isn't that scene in?', it gets very tiresome. The development is quite interesting. It's just... I wish there was a bit more [for Grand Maester Pycelle], I have to say.

GameofThrones.hu: Have you seen the show? Did you like it?

Julian Glover: I've seen the first three episodes. Absolutely, they were wonderful. I saw the first two on a special screening before it opened. The first two minutes were so amazing. Really, really frightening. And you could see all the work which has been done on the screen, the sets, the designs, costumes, and the story, of course. Amazing. That very first shot of the ice wall, coming out of the ice wall, right at the bottom, the little figures, and of course in this series you're gonna go right behind there, cause they're going to Iceland to film those scenes, so that's going to be something else. It's fantastic... An ice wall, it's so imaginitive. And that scene at the very beginnig with the... the, the... whatever they were people, that girl's face hanging on the tree, ah God it was frightening. And it's going on being like that.

I was just saying earlier on that when I read episode nine, I got to the end of it, I thought 'no, no, no, I've missed something here'. So I went back to the beginning, I've picked the script apart, to find out what really happened, but what really happened what was what really happened. For a series to have the courage to kill off its leading man in episode nine is absolutely remarkable. Cause this can't happen. You can't do that! But they really did it.

And of course it's not still flying, but the series had taken off so wonderfully, and we got wonderful responses, including Best Supporting Actor for Peter Dinklage, I think he's the best thing, he's absolutely remarkable, wonderful, wonderful actor.

GameofThrones.hu: He really became Tyrion.

Julian Glover: Absolutely. He's just so intelligent, he knows just how to play the market, just how to play it.

GameofThrones.hu: Thank you very much for the interview. Keep up the good work.
Source: GameOfThrones.Hu