Westeros

Having had a chance to watch Game of Thrones: The Mad King last month, afterwards I went out and visited with the actors as they left at the stage door at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. One of the actors I met and had a wonderful conversation with was Michael Shaeffer, who played the titular Mad King, Aerys II.

He very kindly agreed to sit for an interview to discuss the play, his thoughts on Aerys, and more, The interview was conducted a couple of weeks ago, well before the official announcement that the play would be moving to London in 2027. It has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Elio Garcia: This was the first play I had ever attended. I have read Shakespeare, but reading Shakespeare is not really how you are supposed to experience it, and I had not realized how magical and immersive live performance could be. How does acting onstage differ from acting for the screen? What is different about the energy?

Michael Shaeffer: Very, very different. In the theatre, everything is different every night, and there is a physicality that you have to bring to it. Especially with The Mad King, it is a kind of muscular thing: nearly four hours of quite full-on effort. Everything matters in this world. There are very few casual, “Hey, how are you doing?” moments. It is life-and-death stuff all the time, and that has a demand to it. It requires you to pull yourself up to it.

You really have to get ready for it; you cannot just wander on. We all turn up two hours before the show begins to start warming up, and it takes that time to reach the level we need to deliver it in the way it needs to be delivered—and to deliver it safely. We go through the safety work every night.

Then there is the audience. Audiences react differently every night; some are more vocally responsive than others. But with this show, every night the audience has been with us. You know when an audience is not with you: you can feel and hear it, and people begin to shuffle and become uncomfortable. In spite of this being a fairly lengthy show, people stay with us. You can hear a pin drop all the way through to the end. People are right there with us, which is wonderful.

That connection with the audience is the thing you do not get in front of a camera. When you are filming, you do your thing and never quite know: was that all right? You have to trust that the director will tell you if they want something different. In a theatre, you feel it. The audience tells you. There is a constant feedback loop, and when you have done a lot of theatre your antennae become attuned to whether it is working. It is a magical thing. I love it. I really do.

Elio: Watching it, I felt myself leaning forward, trying to take everything in. Everyone onstage and behind it seemed to be performing a high-wire act: this is the moment and the one chance. There are no retakes that evening.

Shaeffer: That is exactly right. It is a high-wire act. There are 36 of us onstage, and I do not know how many people are backstage—another 20 at least, and surely more when you include wigs, hair and makeup, wardrobe, stage management, sound and lighting. It is enormous. Everyone working together to create that high-wire act every night is a very beautiful thing.

In the age of AI—and it is not coming; it has come—this live, shared experience of performers and audience creating a moment together is something AI cannot do. It has to have the audience as well. This is Peter Brook’s great theory about the magic of theatre: it happens where those two things meet. You cannot have an audience with nothing onstage, and if you have performers without an audience, that is a rehearsal rather than a performance. The magic happens where they meet. AI cannot reproduce it, and I think it feels increasingly special as a result. We are starting to understand and appreciate its value, which is wonderful.

Elio: About 14 years ago, you had a brief and very fatal encounter with Brienne of Tarth at the end of the second season of Game of Thrones. Would that younger actor have believed that, 14 or 15 years later, he would play the Mad King with the Royal Shakespeare Company?

Shaeffer: I was not that young even then, but thank you! It is funny, the twists and turns that a career takes. I have been very lucky to be involved with some wonderful projects onstage and onscreen. I did a tiny part in a Star Wars movie, Rogue One, and I did Kingdom of Heaven with Ridley Scott in Morocco. I have done some lovely things.

Doing Game of Thrones was brilliant fun: being out in Ireland and shooting that. It lasts a couple of minutes, perhaps less, onscreen, but they really do shoot the shit out of stuff on Game of Thrones, as we say. There were multiple cameras and God knows how many takes, especially for the fight sequences, so they could make those fast cuts. It was a hell of a machine to step into and think, “Wow, this is huge.” I really enjoyed it. And I got a nice death. If you are going to die, have a nice death.

Elio: There is a Kingdom of Heaven connection to Game of Thrones, and specifically to its Iron Throne. I visited the set during the first season with George, and they showed us the prototype. It used castings of prop swords, some of which were very clearly stamped “Property of Kingdom of Heaven.” They had bought old prop swords in bulk and reused them. It is strange how things connect.

Shaeffer: That is incredible.

Elio: As I understand it, some actors were involved in the play’s research and development for years, while others came aboard much later. When did you become involved?

Shaeffer: I was not involved in any of the workshops. Everyone had been very good at keeping the secret, because normally in our industry you hear about things that are happening, and I had not heard anything about this. I was just about to go to Mexico—I did some travelling at the beginning of this year—when my agent called. Dominic Cooke, the director, whom I did not know but had long admired and perhaps met once or twice very briefly, wanted me to play this part. The play was not called The Mad King then; it was the “Game of Thrones play.”

I read the script and thought, “I’m not sure that is for me.” I felt that perhaps he had made a mistake. Sometimes you read a script and immediately have half an idea of what you might do with it: it has your name on it, and you really want the job. With this one, I did not know how to do it. I told Dominic that I did not have that automatic response, and he said, “Listen, I don’t know either. Why don’t we discover that together?” I thought that was fair enough. I like a challenge and quite like it when something scares me—when I do not know.

David Bowie said something about artists wanting to reach the point where you have walked out into the sea and your feet can no longer touch the bottom. That is where you want to be as an artist. I have had that feeling with this more or less all the way through, probably most nights still, where I do not really know what I am doing. I am trying to uncover it, understand it and dig deeper every night.

Rehearsals were a process of “floundering with intent”: with Dom and Duncan’s help, trying different avenues and ways in, with a sense of where I might need to get. It still feels in flux, but I think we have arrived somewhere that serves the story and does what it needs to do.

 

Elio: You have some great lines, almost a catchphrase in “I forbid it.” The audience laughed the first time it appeared, but it also speaks to the character’s madness and what he has lost. One scene particularly captured me: Aerys seems lost in time, with his vivid memories of Summerhall mixing with the present. It brings the past into the present and concentrates it in Aerys as someone almost trapped by it. Your scenes with Noah Ritter as Rhaegar must have been intense to rehearse.

Shaeffer: I love playing that scene with Noah, who is a terrific young actor. Summerhall is certainly one of the defining moments for Aerys and shapes the whole direction of his life. He was not supposed to become king; it was only after Summerhall that his father inherited the throne. Aerys is 19 when he becomes king. He was 16 when Rhaegar was born in the fire at Summerhall, as Aerys watched his grandfather burn to death. It is a profoundly traumatic experience.

These days we would discuss it in terms of PTSD. That trauma, in the very real sense of the word, keeps him stuck and defines an awful lot of who he is and his subsequent behaviour. Part of that is his attempt to protect Rhaegar, and it defines much of their relationship. The way I make it work in my own mind is that Rhaegar is the only person he has ever really loved, although I think you could extend that to Viserys as well.

I went through your book, The World of Ice & Fire, and Westeros.org. They were brilliant resources for me, and for many of us who were not necessarily up to speed with everything before coming to this—just invaluable. I worked out that Aerys and Rhaella had eight children after Rhaegar and before Viserys who were miscarried, stillborn or died in infancy. There is the trauma of that, and then Duskendale, where Aerys was held for six months. We do not really know what happened during those months. There are stories of him being pushed around and having his beard pulled which hint at abuse and maltreatment.

Then he spends four years in the Red Keep. He would have had contact with some people, of course, but he was very much not in public. He completely isolates and retreats, presumably playing with wildfire, which is certainly his obsession by that point. We meet him at the beginning of the play at his first public appearance since then. There is so much history that I had to understand and somehow internalise—to make it real for myself—before stepping onstage.

Elio: You really convey it. I felt for Aerys despite knowing him as Aerys the Monstrous or the Mad King, someone who went wrong and became a bad person. There is that saying about the gods tossing a coin, with greatness on one side and madness on the other; perhaps sometimes the coin lands on its edge and you get a little of both. He began with such promise, and then things went wrong.

The production’s Iron Throne entrance was wholly unexpected. I imagined the great doors opening and the throne being pushed through, but instead it rises from the stage and just keeps going. It was a marvel and, within the confines of the stage, closer to the throne depicted in The World of Ice & Fire than the one realised in Game of Thrones. Have you injured yourself sitting on it? It looks spiky and dangerous!

Shaeffer: First, a big shout-out to Chloe Lamford, our designer, for creating that incredible piece of scenery and giving me one of the best stage entrances an actor could hope for. The first time it happened in rehearsal, the cast and crew stood around and cheered as it came up. It was quite a moment. It is a thrill every night and great fun. She has done a remarkable job.

It is not desperately comfortable, but I decided that was perfectly right for this throne. George has told us that it is his favourite physical manifestation of the throne among the few there have been, which is fantastic. It is quite narrow at the top, so there is not much room to move around. One of the tricky things is navigating the steps in my cape without falling down the stairs. So far there have been no major accidents, although every now and then the cape catches and I have to yank it free.

Elio: I heard there were standing ovations every night, and I hope that has continued. How has it been meeting people after the performance who have followed this world since the books began in 1996? Did you feel any trepidation about whether fans would appreciate the play?

Shaeffer: I did have some trepidation. I had an awareness of how deeply loved this series of books is and how much it means to people. We all wanted it to be something that A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones fans loved; it was important that it worked for that community.

This is really my first contact with this community of fans—and it does feel like a community; I use that word advisedly. There are standing ovations every night, which is extraordinary, and every night we meet diehard fans who remain afterwards despite the very long show. It takes me a while to shower and come out, but everyone has been lovely, kind and generous while also showing an awareness of boundaries. That has been very noticeable to all of us. We look forward to it. It is wonderful to meet people who have travelled, often from America but also from all over the world, to see the show in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Last night, a young woman who was seeing the show for the second time had made a bodice with the Targaryen red dragon sigil that Georgia McGuinness designed for Rhaegar in our play. Another had created a beautiful piece of fan art of the crown, with “The Mad King” written in High Valyrian. It blows my mind—and that is just one night. Things like that happen every night, and it is incredible.

It feels different and distinct from other groups of fans. Often, if you are doing a play—especially one with a very famous person in it—there will be autograph hunters and so on. This community feels very different. It is lovely, and we are really enjoying it.

Elio: What do you hope audiences take away about Aerys II and what he endured? And, more broadly, what do you hope they take away from the experience of theatre?

Shaeffer: I will start with the theatre. 57% of bookers were new to the RSC. That is incredible. I am a theatre animal. I work in television and film as well, but theatre is my first love. For this to be so many people’s first theatrical experience is wonderful, because it does not get much better than this. It is magical, different from anything I have ever been involved with, and epic in every way. It has to be to meet the material it draws upon; anything less would do it an injustice.

I hope it encourages people to return to the theatre, see other things and try different things. Sometimes people assume theatre is not for them, perhaps because they had one bad experience. Theatre can be rubbish, and it is really disappointing when it does not work. But the magic of theatre, as opposed to AI slop, is really special to me. People are having such a brilliant first experience, and I hope it will not be their last.

As for Aerys, what other people make of him is in a sense not my business. People call him mad and the play is called The Mad King, so I began by asking: is he? If you start with “he is mad,” what does that mean? “Mad” is such a massive umbrella term that I did not find it a helpful way into the character.

At the beginning of the play, Oswell is telling Arthur that Aerys has to go because he is mad. In rehearsal I asked: at this point, why is he mad? What has he done wrong? He has taken Ilyn Payne’s tongue out. I watched House of the Dragon, and Matt Smith’s character (Daemon Targaryen) chopped someone’s head clean through. Nobody starts calling him the Mad King. That is much worse. Is Aerys not simply a king in this world, prone to acts of sudden violence or cruelty?

My way in was through the character’s history: these things happened to someone, so what effect did they have on him? His story is one in which he loses his father when he is young and is made to marry his sister, which she does not want to do. He is a very isolated, lonely man. The only real possibility for love and connection in his life is Rhaegar. He gets it wrong and makes mistakes, but in a strange way that possibility of love is what drives much of what he does. Whatever “mad” means, I think he has mental-health issues which become exacerbated as the play unfolds.

Elio: It is a complicated answer for a complicated character in a play filled with complicated themes, interactions and relationships. Thank you again for your time. It was wonderful speaking with you, and fingers crossed for future opportunities to see the play.

Shaeffer: Thank you, Elio. We are all keeping our fingers crossed for a future life for the show. Watch this space and we will see what happens.