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.