James Purefoy and Kevin McKidd rule out GAME OF THRONES roles

In an interview with Empire Online to publicise his new TV show, The Following, James Purefoy has confirmed that he will not be appearing in Game of Thrones due to lingering annoyance with HBO over how they ended Rome, and that his co-star Kevin McKidd is of a similar mind.

According to Purefoy, he and McKidd decided on this commitment over lunch:

McKidd and I had lunch the other day, and I said to him, "Have you been asked to do Game Of Thrones?" And he said, "I'd never do it. Because they stole our fucking show." He worked out that if Rome had run for the entire seven seasons that it should have run, we would only have finished it last year. And he feels that HBO did Game of Thrones instead of us, so they stole our show. I kind of agree with him. I won't be doing Game Of Thrones, even if they ask me.

Context: James Purefoy played Mark Antony on HBO's Rome, with McKidd playing the role of Lucius Vorenus. Rome ran for two seasons, airing in 2005 and 2007, and remains the most expensive ongoing weekly show that HBO has ever mounted (the budget for Season 1 exceeded $100 million, or $31 million more than GoT's second season). The show was a co-production between the BBC and HBO. When the BBC decided not to contribute past the second season, HBO cancelled the show for lack of funding and disappointing ratings. Some years later they acknowledged this was a mistake, with the show's performance on DVD and other foreign sales ultimately proving lucrative enough to sustain the show for further seasons.

An attempt was made several years ago by Rome showrunner Bruno Heller to get a spin-off movie off the ground, but this project never made it out of development hell. HBO are currently developing a fresh TV adaptation of Robert Graves's novel I, Claudius (not related to the 1970s BBC mini-series) which some are citing as a spiritual successor to Rome, but due to the much later time period no Rome actors are expected to appear.

Given that HBO was extremely premature - and ultimately proven mistaken - in its decision to cancel Rome, I can understand McKidd and Purefoy's decision not to appear on further HBO series. However, some of their Rome co-stars have chosen to take another view, with both Ciaran Hinds (Caesar) and Tobias Menzies (Brutus) joining Thrones in its third season, as Mance Rayder and Edmure Tully respectively.

Curiously, Purefoy was much more positive about Thrones in an interview eighteen months ago:

If it was the right role on Game of Thrones, definitely. Of course! It’s a terrific series. It’s a great series of books. I love HBO. I’m on record saying that HBO is the best television company in the world, and I believe they are. I think they absolutely understand how to make television that is really, really vital and interesting and visceral, and all the things that television really should be. I’m a big fan of HBO.

 Hmm.

Ciarán Hinds is Mance Rayder in GAME OF THRONES

After a significant amount of speculation, HBO has announced that Ciarán Hinds will be playing the role of Mance Rayder in the third season of Game of Thrones (and, based on the books, presumably for several seasons afterwards).

Ciarán Hinds is a distinguished Irish actor with a long history on stage, television and film. His film work has included roles in John Boorman's Excalibur, Persuasion, Munich and Miami Vice. On TV, he was a main character in the BBC mini-series version of Ivanhoe and Channel 4's Cold Lazarus (the final work by the famous Dennis Potter) before achieving arguably his career highlight of playing Gaius Julius Caesar in HBO's Rome. Hinds's performance as the infamous Roman leader was flawlessly compelling, making the complex character come to life. Hinds's Caesar is, for my money, the definitive depiction of the character. More recently he played Aberforth Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 and was reunited with Daniel Radcliffe in The Woman in Black.

Mance Rayder is a much-mentioned character in the first two seasons of Game of Thrones. He is a former member of the Night's Watch who ultimately found the rules and regulations of the order too much to bear. He turned his cloak and left the Wall to seek a new life amongst the wildlings. Over a period of several years, he rose to become a respect chieftain and battle-commander, and eventually was proclaimed the King-beyond-the-Wall by acclamation. At the end of Season 2 of Game of Thrones, he has assembled an army of thousands of wildlings in the Skirling Pass for unknown reasons.

This is excellent news. I've been a fan of Ciarán Hinds's work for almost two decades and he will be a tremendous asset to the production. It's true that Hinds is older than Mance in the books, but it's also true that we knew the character was going to be older anyway: Mormont spoke of Mance as a near-contemporary in earlier episodes and in Season 1 we learned that Mance was King-beyond-the-Wall more than a decade before the events of the series, making him substantially older than in the books. Dominic West, who was offered the role but declined, would have been a fine Mance, but I think Hinds has the potential to be an even better one.

Hinds is the second Rome alum to be cast in Thrones. Tobias Menzies, who played Brutus in Rome, has also been cast as Catelyn Stark's younger brother, Ser Edmure Tully. Both can be seen in this excellent scene from the first season (as first pointed out by Westeros.org):