The Beautiful Death of Barristan Selmy

Last week, I wondered why Robert Ball, the artist who draws vivid renderings of the deaths of various Game of Thrones characters as they happen, hadn’t honored Barristan the Bold, who we saw die on screen at the end of Episode 4. It was in fact because he was saving him for this week. (Though it was not because there were no deaths in episode 5. It just meant that Ball honored Selmy this week instead of having to honor the master who became dragon food.)

The fact that Selmy did not die in glory is perhaps one of the reasons that fans have taken his death so hard. Ian McElhinney also seemed pretty sour on it, as we could tell from his Twitter Q&A earlier this week.

It’s still a matter of some debate as to whether McElhinney is the cast member everyone mentioned before the season started, the one who allegedly took his death very hard. Clearly, this was the actor Entertainment Weekly was talking about in the pre-season. I am less sure that he is the actor Benioff and Weiss discussed during their Oxford Union address a couple of months ago. What they describe seems pretty unprofessional, and I have a hard time believing that someone like McElhinney, who has had a long career in the BBC, would do what they describe. Then of course, there’s Jonathan Pryce, who has mentioned an actor “who hadn’t read the script and he didn’t know what was going to happen to him. He died and he wasn’t happy.” Is he also referring to McElhinney? Or is he talking about someone he actually shared scenes with this season? (Gossip moves fast on sets, even ones that span many countries, so there’s no guarantee that story had anything to do with someone Pryce was filming with.)

• Published on 05/17/2015 at 9:00 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:04 PM CDT