Curtain Call: Stephen Dillane

“Go ahead. Do your duty.” -Stannis

I come here not to praise Stannis Baratheon, but to bury him. One of the most unlovable characters from the books, Stannis was always going to be a tough role to play, for any actor. A religious zealot, we met Robert Baratheon’s younger brother burning statutes of Westeros’ seven gods on the beaches of Dragonstone. It did not get easier from there.

I will be blunt. Stephen Dillane was not my fancast pick for Stannis, and I was actually bummed out when the actor who seemed to me perfect (Christopher Eccleston) was passed over for him. But Dillane, over the course of four seasons, won me over. A highly regarded and decorated theater actor by trade (Tony, Theater World, and Desk Drama Award winner), Dillane was not one for the press tours of TV and the glare of the red carpet. It’s no accident that there are no direct interviews with him this week, despite the death of his character. Much like Stannis, that’s not Dillane’s way. Check out what he’s like when he is forced to do silly interviews, like this video from the BAFTAs last year.

You can appreciate his advice to “Be yourself.” Clearly it’s what helped him get the role of Stannis.

Speaking of which, although Stannis was an unlikable, unyielding son of a bitch, he had his fans. Those who loved “Stannis The Mannis” abounded, and spent most of this season yelling “I told you so” as the show slowly made the character more likable. After all, a man who will not bend and will not yield is also the sort of man who will move heaven and earth to miraculously cure his daughter’s greyscale. (Somehow he is never given credit for finding some way to stop this seemingly unstoppable disease dead in it’s tracks—if he’d followed through and invented vaccinations, millions of lives could have been saved.) And who on the internet doesn’t love a grammar nazi? Anyone who possessed Stannis’ stiff and cold sense of justice would be a stickler for the proper use of Westerosi language.

Little did his fans realize that it was all a set up.

In earlier seasons, Dillane’s work on the Game of Thrones was overshadowed by showier performances, but the final episodes of Season 5 gave him the chance to bring the drama by portraying a man so righteously convinced of his destiny that he was willing to burn alive the only thing in the world that gave him humanity. While his wife was collapsed on the ground, sobbing her heart out, Stannis stood firm, and yet the look in his eyes and the set of his jaw spoke volumes—somewhere, deep inside this man, his heart was breaking.

But that had nothing on his final performance in “Mother’s Mercy,” as he slowly awoke to the discovery that the gods lie—it was all a trick. For the crime of kinslaying his one link to humanity, the universe took first his army, then his wife, then his priestess, leaving him naked and alone, on a field of melting snow, with only a suicidal mission before him.

Stannis was never one to bend, or to yield. Dillane walked him directly to his death, knowing it to be the right and just way for this to end. “Go on. Do your duty,” he told Brienne, as she stood over him, the embodiment of vengeance for the murder of his brother Renly, his original kinslaying. Just and right to the end, Dillane finally gave the character the iconic moment he’ll be remembered for.

• Published on 06/19/2015 at 9:30 AM CDT
• Last updated on 06/19/2015 at 9:30 AM CDT