HBO's adaptation of Game of Thrones - Thread 2. There are a lot of nerds.

tbf it is a thankless role, littlefinger on the show is what happens when you don't trust your audience to get subtlety. he's a stage whisper incarnate.

now that I think about it the show does seem to have been winnowed down to focus on all the worst actors

i like onion knight as an actor. varys as well. tyrion is p good. cersei. dunno if i'm forgetting about anyone in that list.

no that's pretty much my list

Jim Broadbent ofc, but we haven't seen much of him

hound is decent too and the dondaryon types always seem good when on screen.

they've definitely killed off some really great actors, charles dance, michael mcelhatton. i saw stephen dillane (stannis) in faith healer at donmar warehouse last year and he was mindblowingly good. that sort of gravitas is hard to replace.

yeah I guess there a few other peripheral types (Diana Rigg too) but it's the fact that you've got Emilia Clarke, Kit Harrington, Sophie Turner, etc front and centre. Even Maisie Williams, who was good as a precocious kid, rings false to me now

yep, agreed. i was always surprised it was rob stark that was killed off just because kit harrington is such a bad actor, but obv that was to do with the books.

Michelle Fairley was among the best of them, too. There's def something to the "they killed off 90% of the good actors" argument

the older ppl dying and the younger ones sticking around isn't some kind of grievous error tho, it's the point of the story. presumably there are some good young actors out there but i imagine they are harder to find than good middle aged ones

not to mention that they cast a lot of the younger actors when they were children. arya and bran were perfect in the first couple seasons, but it's hard to predict how they'll develop

well, I'm not saying it's the showrunners' fault per se but that is the reality of this tv programme now. And it's the worse for it

I think Gillen is good, I've liked him in a few things, but never watched the other shows he was a regular in. His sparring with Varys, all the Lysa stuff and revealing his feelings to Sansa was all great I think.

I'm not sure how much we can blame the actors for the recent performances when everything is suffering. There's only so much they can do. Tyrion used to be one of the major reasons to watch.

Yeah, so many of the surviving characters feel like plot cogs first and distinct personalities a distant second now. It's tough to render that into a compelling performance.

I guess it's a blessing it's the fact Neal season since we have all figured out the show is no good

that was the death knell for autocorrect on this phone. final season. final.

I won't let it retcon how good the earlier seasons were. Fourth season is still some of my favourite tv ever.

i honestly don't think that the show has fallen off that much, obv there are some clunker characters and plotlines now, but each season had its share of pacing problems and its share of unbeatable moments.

the only truly perfect season was the first one, which coincidentally happened to be the one most faithful to the novel

Yeah perhaps all this is premature but that last episode really was the worst.

I checked to see if it's new writers and directors but no. I don't have the patience to check who did the best and worst episodes and try to remember it all.

Didn't the first season have some of the worst sex/nudity?

Ennnh, it has some of the highest highs (incl the pilot and the last two episodes) but there's a lot of rough material in the middle, and the sexposition / overreliance on T&A was at its worst there. (xp!)

Maybe that was their clumsy attempt to assure viewers this wasn't for kids.

besides the one very egregious littlefinger scene (i'm pretty sure you guys know the one), the back half of season 1 put the sexposition aside and delivered the tightest, most suspenseful plotting the show has ever done.

yeah Gillen is probably the best actor in the whole ensemble tbh, he's had to sell a ton of dodgy dialogue

Rory McCann yo

Littlefinger was in two of the best moments invented for the show, the 'power is power' confrontation with Cersei and his 'chaos is a ladder' speech.

I never enjoy agreeing with Fred B

But so it must B

. i saw stephen dillane (stannis) in faith healer at donmar warehouse last year and he was mindblowingly good.

I just started watching The Tunnel last night, and was reminded that Stannis was one of the best actors. Renley was pretty good, too - now he's Charles Manson. oh well. I think Brianne and Tormund are the best we've got left, besides Lord Carcetti.

Thanks for bringing that back up. I forgot that the Briamund / Toranne ship is still a thing that could be awesome. Although it will inevitably get compared to Steggy and I'll just have to not click on those articles because DUH ALREADY WROTE THAT IN MY HEAD JUST NOW

What is Steggy?

autocorrect or something from a show about dinosaurs your kid watches?

Stan + Peggy from Mad Men

ugh what a stupid name -- I think I'm going to go back two minutes when I thought it was a large wide-eyed animated Stegosaurus.

I am not going to apologize because that portmanteau is not my fault.

But clearly they should have gone with Pan

lol

Littlefinger was in two of the best moments invented for the show, the 'power is power' confrontation with Cersei and his 'chaos is a ladder' speech.

obv opinions vary but the "chaos is a ladder" speech is precisely where gillen's acting/accent went off the rails, imo.

Lol, accents have long been the least of this show's problems. Everyone might as well speak like Edgar G Robinson.

what's weird is he did a show in ireland where he played corrupt former irish prime minister charles j haughey, and littlefinger has basically been charlie ever since.

I can't recall the delivery, but it was a really well-written speech, that said so much about the character. The show rarely does that.

it was a good piece of script, i watched it again yday and i think tbf part of why i found it a bit ott was that it showed other scenes and used his speech as a voiceover.

my favorite created for the show was that season 1 convo between cersei and robert, brilliantly played by both actors and shining a depth on cersei that we never get to see in the books, even in (or especially in) her POV chapters.

i love this one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTgiPmG7OLE

^ Might be a good joke if at some point you see the same box in the background at Dragonstone at some point. I assume he just left the wizard to die when he left King's Landing though.

Is the Cersei/Oberyn scene in the books? That was one of her best also.

ha yeah that's one of the best

srsly guys how are you sleeping on rory mccann?

is it bc he doesn't have big speeches?

I think I forget about him cause he is absent for long stretches, he's quite good though

i mentioned him!

his scenes are really the only thing I look forward to right now. would have been very happy if they'd spun off a season of just him and Arya wandering the riverlands like medieval Big Daddy and Hit-Girl

This episode was hard to watch, but also fantastic. If you have to do away with some side characters played by some of your best talent, this is the way to do it.

I just can't handle how fast everything is wrapping up. Like we spent how many years of characters traveling and traveling and now people just jump from one place to another in seconds. Although I did like some of that at the end. Like jumping to the aftermath of Lannister vs Tyrell.