GoT's Charles Dance Was Not Happy With His First Scene As Tywin Lannister
Charles Dance made many fans happy when he first appeared in Game of Thrones as Tywin Lannister, but the actor himself was not OK with the way it happened.
Game of Thrones has many characters that you can't speak about without using the word "iconic."
While different in many ways, they became beloved by the fans as soon as they first appeared on the screen, but above most of them — if not all — is Tywin Lannister, the legendary patriarch of the richest noble House of Westeros.
Each scene with Tywin is sharp and to the point, much like his character. His very presence made any other character feel smaller, and he was most definitely one of the people fans either loved or hated with no in-between.
Charles Dance made a phenomenal job of portraying this wise, powerful, and morally questionable man.
From the first scene, we can clearly see the way Tywin is: when he speaks to his son, Jaime, he's harvesting a stag.
Wearing his House's colors and speaking of his legacy, Tywin Lannister looks like the noblest lord you've ever seen — and yet, he isn't afraid to get his hands covered in blood both literally and figuratively.
While brilliantly establishing his character, this scene was unnecessarily complicated — not plot-wise, but on the technical level.
The reason being, even though there was no need for it, the tent where Tywin was harvesting the stag was out in the open.
Charles Dance doesn't have too fond memories about shooting his character's first scene; if anything, he still has no idea why it had to be shot that way at all.
"The first one was in a tent. It was in a tent. That was in a field. At three o'clock in the morning. Bitterly cold. And I thought, 'Why are we in this tent? There are no shots outside the tent!' This tent could be set up on the studio floor, and we could all be warm… Instead of freezing our asses off in the middle of this field, twenty miles outside of Belfast," recalls Charles.
According to him, the weather was way too cold for anyone's comfort, but the director still decided to shoot there.
This was a bit of a rough introduction to the show for Charles Dance, and though he's still clueless as to why the tent couldn't be set up in a warm studio, we like to think that was to make him truly feel the character and become as cold as Tywin, literally.
Which, as we saw later, he did brilliantly.