![]() There are some scenes in Game of Thrones that take my breath away.”ĭance as Tulkinghorn in the BBC’s Bleak House. There’s some really great writing going on and the production values are cinematic, especially Game of Thrones. Some of the best television now is being imported from America. “We rightly used to say we have the finest television in the world,” he says. But the past two decades in America have famously yielded a historic crop including The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. In recent years Dance, seen in the magnificent BBC adaptation of Bleak House, has been impressed by British productions such as Sherlock, Wolf Hall and Happy Valley. I know it’s struggling, it really is, so when I say they’re trying to make $10 go as far as $100, it’s probably because they have very little choice, but having said that, if they have a choice between making a piece of shit reality television and a terrific piece of drama, I think they should go for the terrific piece of drama and let the commercial companies make their reality television.” It’s just stupid, you know? They pour money into junk reality television. “It’s a pain in the arse and they expect crews to work on very minimal deals and less than their usual fee. I know a lot of crew people and indeed actors whose enthusiasm for a project is dampened when they know it’s going to be made by the BBC because they know they’re going to be penny pinching. “They think they can get a hundred dollars’ worth for spending 10. When it comes to the BBC, Dance pulls no punches. “If that had been the BBC, they’d have pulled the plug on it immediately and I was told that there was a time when the BBC were going to be part of the co-production and thank God they weren’t, because HBO knows how to spend money, and it was HBO and Sky Atlantic.” His career spans The Jewel in the Crown (1984), set in the last days of the British Raj in India, and Game of Thrones (2011- ), which few could have predicted would have become such a phenomenon.ĭance reflects: “The pilot they made was not that successful but HBO kind of nurtured it, thought there was mileage in this, and embarked on the first series. Photograph: ITV / Rex Featuresįew actors can speak of TV drama with the authority of the Worcestershire-born performer. Dance puts on a cockney accent as he recalls the stranger saying: “You’ve got this great death scene!”Ĭharles Dance as Guy Perron in The Jewel in the Crown. “I mean, if people are going to be offended by it, they can turn it off.”Īs for his own notorious demise, which rivals anything in King Lear or Titus Andronicus, the news was broken to him by a man in the street. “So there’s all this rumpy pumpy going on, it was all doggy fashion, and I said to David and Dan, the two writers – and they’re also executive producers – ‘Well, obviously the missionary position didn’t come into vogue in the Seven Kingdoms for some time to come.’ They said, ‘We wanted it to be animalistic, Charles.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s certainly that! Wham, bam, thank you mam.’” I didn’t come into episode seven or something in season one, so this was all stuff I wasn’t involved in but I wanted to see what the flavour of the piece was. ![]() “They screened the first couple of episodes of season one for a whole bunch of us. Was Dance ever concerned about the series’ extreme sex and violence? “No,” he says frankly. The answer, Google reveals later, is Raymond Richard. “Do you happen to know what the RR stands for? Neither do I. “I didn’t know what it was about and I hadn’t read and I haven’t since read any of George RR Martin’s books,” he muses in an interview at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. ![]() He casually admits he had little idea what he was getting into with Game of Thrones, having been put off the books by their “frightening” thickness. ![]() Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister: ‘you’ve got a great death scene!’ Photograph: ©HBO USAĭance, who shares nothing with Trump but age (both are 70), is an Englishman to his boots with disarming mix of tall, aristocratic bearing and demotic earthiness and candour he would doubtless be at ease both in the club and the pub. ![]()
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