If you had to choose which actor did the best job of bringing his character to life on Game of Thrones, many people would say it was Charles Dance. The veteran actor embodied Tywin Lannister, with many of the most die-hard book fans saying they cannot read a Tywin segment without hearing Dance's voice.
Dance said he took the part because the script did not use the word "gotten", saying that it made his skin crawl to read period scripts with modern language.
The 72-year-old actor was delighted at the literary pedigree of the show, citing the creators Trinity College education as a big factor for its success. Speaking on BBC Radio 2 he said:
It’s the quality of the writing principally. Dan Weiss and David Benioff were both English graduates at Trinity Dublin, I believe. They are well schooled in the language. Because a lot of the time if I get a period script, even if it is a mythical period but it is supposed to be in England, and I read the word ‘gotten’ it makes the hairs go up on the back of my neck. There wasn’t a single ‘gotten’ in this at all.
We did some fact-checking and Dan Weiss and David Benioff met in Trinity College back in 1995, where they both studied a postgraduate in Irish literature.
Dance played the patriarch of the Lannister family for the first four seasons of the epic television saga until his character was killed off in 2015. He recently said he was "confused" by the show's ending, telling Good Morning Britain:
It got to the very end, and I thought 'Hmm OK
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"Hmm OK" seems to be the universal response to Bran the broken.
