Jonathan Pryce Admits He Originally Turned Down Game of Thrones

Though the BBC pulled out of producing Game of Thrones long before the show ever came to air, the network’s influence is still felt in the way the show casts British heavyweights in key roles. From Charles Dance to Diana Rigg, these names lent a credibility to the production long before it became the biggest show in the world.

And it’s that credibility that helped bring actor Jonathan Pryce into the Game of Thrones fold this season, when the show cast the part of the High Sparrow. This wasn’t Pryce’s first offer from the show, mind you. As he reveals in a new interview with BBC4, he had been offered a role back in those first early days when the production was still half BBC-produced. Though he doesn’t say what the role was, he admits that his dislike of the fantasy genre caused him to turn it down without really looking at it. The trappings put him off.

“I don’t like swords and fantasy things. I am that person who has never seen Star Wars, I’ve never seen any of the Lord of the Rings things…In fact I’d said no to the very original series of Game of Thrones and all I did was flip through and look at the names, these strange names, strange dialogue and I thought ‘oh, it’s not for me’.”

Kind of shocking, when you realize that the role that brought Pryce to fame originally was the dystopian fantasy cult film Brazil. But no matter. By the time Season 5 went into production, and some of the biggest names in the BBC clamoring for parts, his opinion had changed, especially once he could compare the character to other real-world roles.

One person Pryce doesn’t compare his character to is the other one he’s playing, running on PBS concurrent with this season of Game of Thrones, that of Cardinal Wolsey in Wolf Hall. The two characters are in many ways polar opposites, with the High Sparrow living in self-enforced poverty, only to find himself being raised up by powerful friends, while the Cardinal was once a powerful man from Rome, cast down into poverty by the whim of once-powerful friends. (Watching Game of Thrones back to back with Wolf Hall is kind of a bizarro world experience. Not to mention that half the Game of Thrones cast shows up in other roles in an alternate universe world sort of way.)

Instead he saw the political corollaries to our own modern day world in his character. He compares his character to our modern world religious figure, Pope Francis.

“[He is a] man of the people, he dressed in rags, he feeds the poor, takes care of the poor. Yet he is this incredibly powerful figure who has the wherewithal to dispense justice against somebody – I won’t tell you who it is.”

Whoever that person is, they’re probably in for it. As Pryce’s character said this past Sunday “No one is special.” In a world where the one percent in the Red Keep keep their positions in part because of the assumption they are special by virtual of their family names, everyone should quake in their boots.

• Published on 04/28/2015 at 9:30 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT