Game of Thrones has a lot of characters to deal with. Or, at least, it used to.
The show did give viewers a plethora of characters, titles and house banners to remember from the outset, but as the show has progressed those characters have one-by-one been killed off, leaving us with a much smaller cast of characters from what we had even a couple of seasons back.
For some actors playing minor roles, it probably felt like you could get lost in the crowd a little. For one actor, his storyline became increasingly tiresome - and he just wanted out of the entire thing.
Julian Glover, the 84-year-old actor who played Pycelle for the first six seasons, asked to be written out of the show before it reached season eight. As the slow and elderly Grand Maester for the Seven Kingdoms, he mostly remained sitting on the King's small council, often butting heads with Cersei Lannister as she tried to wrestle power away from the council for her own ends.
Eventually, he was killed off at the end of season six, after Master of Whisperers Qyburn arranges for his assassination via a brutal stabbing. But long before he learned of this demise, the actor was asking to be written out of the show - hoping to take the route out that so many others had taken before him. After all, all men must die.
In an interview with IGN recently, he revealed that he didn't want to remain in the series because of the storyline his character was on, and he particularly didn't like the relationship he had with Cersei. He explained:
"Cersei ticked me off all the time, and I never had any comeback. So that wasn’t any fun to play, so I went to them and said, 'Look, I don’t want to do this anymore, it’s not interesting to go on doing this… and what’s going to happen to him?'
"They said, 'Oh, you can’t go, we’ve got a wonderful scene for you.'
"Anyway, to cut a long story short, I got the scene, and it was my death scene, which is a damn good scene. And this is exactly the sort of way I wanted to go out."
Thankfully, he got his easy out of the series - and in one of the show's more memorable and satisfying deaths too. That might just be me - I was longing for the Grand Maester to go for a long time.
When it comes to the end of Tyrion's story, Peter Dinklage apparently guessed his ultimate fate right, more or less. "This is the first time ever that I didn’t skip to the end,’ the actor told Entertainment Weekly. "Why? I was probably terrified. We all feel we’re the leads of our own show."
"I had all these ideas in my head and a version of one of them is how it ends up [for Tyrion]. David and Dan have a brilliant version of what I had. If I use any adjectives it will give it away, but I love how it ended up. And how it ends up for everybody. They had a beautiful gentle touch with some and a hard touch with others."
As if we needed any more reasons to be excited for the next season.
