Film & TV

Game of Thrones’ Rory McCann on Clegane-bowl, Brienne of Tarth, and shooting ‘Beyond the Wall’

We saw a lot of The Hound in Season 7 of Game of Thrones. He played a crucial role in the battle beyond The Wall — he who casts the first stone and all, right? He and Brienne of Fucking Tarth had a moment where they acted like proud parents of baby assassin Arya. He saved Tormund from White Walkers. And he came face-to-face for the first time with his blue-skinned lil bro, Gregor. So what does Rory McCann think of all of this? In The Game Revealed, he tells us about Brienne, The Mountain, and shooting way up North.

There are many great re-acquaintances in the show this year. Who does the Hound meet for old times’ sake?

RORY McCANN: I catch up with Brienne, after she ‘killed’ him last time. But I think Sandor’s at, kind of, peace with her. He understands that she was doing her job and he was doing the same kind of job and they just had a clash. That was all cool and that was great to work with Gwendoline [Christie] again. It was all good. There was almost a smile between us.

Courtesy of HBO

Anyone else?

RM: Yeah I meet my brother, The Mountain, Gregor Clegane, this year, played by Hafpor [Júlíus Björnsson]. That’s a first. They bump in to each other in the big sort of UN conference in the Dragon’s Pit in King’s Landing. That was great because even though in the scenes there’s all this big politics going on all The Hound sees is his brother and he doesn’t care what’s going on. He walks up and goes, “Remember me? You’re still getting it by the way.” It’s a quick conversation but you just know the fans are going, “I knew it! Here we go – this bloody Clegane-bowl is on!”

Are you excited at the prospect?

RM: Yeah I’d better start bloody training! He’s not that much taller than me but if it kicks off, I’m still gonna be the Jack Russell and he’s gonna be the Rottweiler.

 Where have you been shooting this year?

RM: We were out in Seville, and then a lot of the freezing stuff was done in Belfast, 1,000 foot up above a quarry, up in the clouds. That was brutal – we had hard weather there but we really bonded. In between sets and moves we’d be going back to our trailers and everyone was covered in shit. We’d just be stuck in this portacabin playing Risk. I mean the mad thing was in Belfast, because there weren’t real blizzards going on, they had to have these massive fans: the sort of fans that you would have on the back of a boat to get through swamps. We’d have at least two of them going with guys throwing snow in front of it and you couldn’t hear what the next actor was saying so everyone was just lip reading. Then there was Iceland – that was amazing but there were some days where it was unbelievably cold, really hardcore sometimes. Not that I’m complaining – it was fantastic jumping into Super Jeeps just to get to set and Iceland is stunning. I mean I lived in Iceland for a year, so I love it there.

THE GAME REVEALED

For GAME OF THRONES fans who are still dissecting and debating the major developments of season seven after the dramatic finale, HBO has released THE GAME REVEALED, a new post-season, behind-the-scenes series. The seven-part series features exclusive interviews with cast and crew that provide new info and insights on how some of the biggest moments from the latest season of the HBO series came together. The first episode of THE GAME REVEALED is now available on HBO Asia’s Facebook page, and fans. Subsequent episodes will stream on HBO GO every Wednesday fromSeptember 6 onwards.

 

0 comments on “Game of Thrones’ Rory McCann on Clegane-bowl, Brienne of Tarth, and shooting ‘Beyond the Wall’

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: