Game News Video Games Reviews & News
Related Articles
(opens in new tab)
Harry Lloyd on Viserys Targaryen (reckons he should be king of Westeros – so he marries his sister to Khal Drogo in return for his armies to help claim the throne)
With all that sex and violence, his isn’t what you’d usually associate from TV fantasy, is it?
It’s not, and that’s kind of the great thing about it. I remember reading that pilot script for the first time and I wasn’t struck that they’d done something interesting with the genre. I was just struck that was a f**king great piece of writing – I don’t care if that’s set in Nicaragua or in the future. With those characters, it can be set anywhere, it’s just a great story, and therefore you can follow that story and get involved in that world – it just happens to be Westeros. I think it’s really well written first and foremost.
Was the blurring of the lines between good and bad a draw?
Yeah, it’s just a human story, and like all great human dramas everyone’s got a lot of different facets to him that are often contradictory. There’s no such thing as a baddie in real life. Everyone who does something does so for a reason – no one gets up, turns up in the morning and says ‘I’m going to really piss everyone off today because that’ll make me feel good.’ And if they do, why are they doing it? Everyone’s very much got a motivation in this. It’s very clear in the books and even clearer when you’ve got different people portraying each character in the series that everyone’s coming from somewhere and going somewhere else, everyone’s on a journey trying to get something and not everyone can get there. There are going to be casualties on the way because not everyone can get what they want but everyone’s going to do their damnedest, and I think that makes for good drama on the whole.
You’ve appeared in UK shows like Doctor Who and Robin Hood . How did Game OF Thrones compare?
It’s very much a different drama to those two because it’s that much more adult. I think the characters are that much more complex, and it’s painted on a much broader canvas. And obviously there’s a bigger budget and there’s a bit more time and a bit more detail and the scale is bigger. So I guess it does feel different, but any time you’re standing in front of a camera talking to someone else you’re not aware of production behind it all – you’re just making sense of the scene, so it all becomes very simple when you’re getting on with it.
But shooting somewhere like Malta can’t hurt?
Yeah, there was nothing shabby about that experience!. It was great in Malta, though everyone was ready to get some sunshine after the freezing cold of Belfast, and we arrived in Malta during their biggest storm for the last ten years when we were trying to shoot the Dothraki wedding in episode one. It was this huge outside scene with hundreds of extras, and it just got stormed out for the three days, so for the first three days we just sat in our hotel and twiddled our thumbs – it was very nice but everybody was getting a bit antsy. And then suddenly the sun broke for three days and we filmed it, and then the heavens poured down again.
Your character’s very much the talker. Will we see some action?
It’s very close to the books. The action in the books is the action we get. Viserys is someone with a huge amount of pent up aggression and is very violent towards his sister which we see, but he’s not someone who would take on another man, because ultimately he’s not a fighter,
And finally: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
