Noah Taylor on Locke’s exit and being the bad guy
This week’s episode saw the gruesome end of a character that Game of Thrones viewers had grown to loathe: Locke, the henchman of House Bolton, played by Noah Taylor. The character when initially introduced raised some eyebrows as he was a significant alteration of his book counterpart, Vargo Hoat. But over time, Taylor and the writers created a character who was nasty in his own way, and this season set a new path altogether by sending Locke to the Wall.
In a new interview with Vulture, Noah Taylor discusses the filming of the show, his character’s perspective, and his exit.
On learning Locke was set to die in season 4:
“I just assumed I was going to die this season, so it wasn’t a big shock or disappointment to me. And I was fine with it. I kind of expected Locke to have some sort of demise, partly because of what he did to Jaime Lannister, and in my imagination, I thought Jaime would have something to do with it, possibly, to have a sort of karmic revenge at some point. But nobody knows. Nobody in the cast really knows until the scripts come out, and they are sort of guarded about that. But this scene involved prosthetics, and those were done months before, and that was when I first knew I was going to die, actually. They send you to the prosthetics factory to get fitted for a broken spinal cord, and that’s always a good indication that something bad is going to happen to you.”
On shooting the climactic scene at Craster’s Keep:
“Really, the hardest part was just running with Isaac [Hempstead-Wright], because of course he started off as a small kid, really, but he’s going through adolescence and he’s sprouted up. He’s basically the same height as me, and I’m getting on in the years, so that was the hardest part, running around with this person on my shoulders for a couple of hours, and the rest is a hanging rig thing.”
On being a potential focus of hate, he says:
“Well, I don’t see Locke as particularly a bad guy! It’s a brutal world, but even within that, he was just someone trying to carve out an existence for himself. And he has kind of a dislike of the highborn aristocracy, as it were. He’s kind of a revolutionary figure in a way, like that speech he gave to Jaime Lannister: “You’ve had it all your own way, with your daddy’s power and your daddy’s money.” It’s sort of a class thing that drives him more than anything else.”
To read more about Taylor’s experience with getting fitted for the prosthetic broken neck, being a Luddite and Locke’s sadism, visit Vulture to read the full article.
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