Mark Addy, cast as Robert Baratheon in HBO‘s Game of Thrones, will be appearing on screens around the world in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood this weekend. He’s cast in the role of Friar Tuck, a part that he tells the BBC he was offered after Scott saw him appear in the Red Riding trilogy. Close watchers of the casting process for Game of Thrones will recall that Red Riding also featured Sean Bean and Joseph Mawle from the production, and was cast by the pilot’s U.K. casting director, Nina Gold.
A still from the film featuring Addy can be found at Ace Showbiz.
A tweet from ickle_tayto suggests that some sort of auditioning for HBO’s Game of Thrones has been taking place in Dublin’s Central Hotel today, with many nervous actors about. Very interesting, indeed.
As Adam Whitehead of the Wertzone (who brought this to our attention at the A Song of Ice and Fire forum) notes, ickle_tayto is one of the organizers/ of this year’s Octocon science fiction and fantasy convention, at which GRRM will be a Guest of Honor.
Update: A response to a query suggests that the auditioning is for small parts, and possibly extras. A cursory search shows that some extras casting agencies, such as MovieExtras.ie, make use of the Central Hotel’s facilities for this purpose.
Award-winning artist Thomas Canty is auctioning off several pieces of original art from Subterranean Press’s beautiful illustrated limited edition of A Feast for Crows. The auctions are among many that have been organized by friends of Deb Mensinger, wife of author Laurie Marks, to defray the costs of a liver transplant that Ms. Mensinger requires. More information can be found here.
Canty’s art is highly sought after by collectors, and it doesn’t often show up for sale via the internet, so it’s a rare opportunity for fans of the series and Canty’s work.
The pictures from the Conan shoot in Bulgaria are flooding pretty much every geek film site out there, but we thought we might as well hop on the bandwagon and point them out, as some of them feature Jason Momoa in the titular role. He looks suitably barbaric, which is a good sign for his role as Drogo in HBO’s Game of Thrones and certainly even more muscular than when we last saw him at the pilot wrap party.
Will he retain that level of muscle tone for the reshoots? It’ll be interesting to see when the we get our first look at him as Khal Drogo in publicity stills as the air date approaches.
It’s interesting to read GRRM’s high praise (there are spoilers) for Tamzin Merchant—formerly cast as Daenerys in the pilot for HBO’s Game of Thrones—and her performance in the fifth episode of the Tudors. It’s very clear that he’s saddened that she will not be continuing on with the series. Obviously, the reasons for Merchant’s departure from Game of Thrones are unknown, and may never be revealed, but it does not seem very likely that it had to do with GRRM (and perhaps other producers?) having any issues with her performance.
No decision has yet been made in casting for Daenerys Targaryen, from what GRRM has recently indicated, but we expect it will be nailed down by the end of the month or, at the latest, the beginning of next month.
GRRM has more remarks to share concerning the ongoing casting process for HBO’s Game of Thrones. Most notably, no one has yet been cast, but they are getting close on some roles, he thinks. He adds that he’s uncertain that he’ll be able to provide hints, as he did for the pilot, but if so he promises to use the Froggy the Gremlin image on those posts to indicateit.
A short snippet from his post follows, naming some of the characters whose audition tapes he’s been reviewing:
“I’ve been looking at many audition tapes. Varys. Littlefinger. Pyp. Grenn. Sam. Ser Gregor. Renly. Bronn. Septa Mordane. Jory. The Old Bear. Even Marillion. And probably some other characters that I’ve forgotten about, writing this off the top of my head.
“Some very hard choices await us. For some parts, a wealth of great possibilities, and no way to go wrong. For others, two or three strong contenders, then it tails off sharply. For a few, we have yet to see anyone who excites us, so the search goes on.”
Weighing in on the current debates on fan fiction, George R.R. Martin shares a number of thoughts on the subject, reiterating his opposition to fan fiction based on his work, enumerating some of his reasons for it, and explaining why he believes those authors who permit it are in error.
At his “Not a Blog”, George R.R. Martin shares some odds and ends. Among them are some interesting remarks on the casting process, in which he notes that casting is roughly in order of a character’s appearance, so some roles (such as Tywin Lannister and Shae) will be cast later. They are “mostly concerned with filling parts for the pilot reshoots and episode two.” Obviously, Daenerys is one of those parts, but we’ve previously been told that many of the characters with no lines in the pilot—Tommen has been mentioned—were given to extras, essentially, and would now be recast with their permanent actors. Via Twitter, I know that the young actress for the part of Myrcella in the pilot has or will be auditioning to retain the role.
He also adds, regarding actors who’ve auditioned: “Some actors are household names who would be recognized by any film or television fan, some are veteran character actors, some are brilliant young newcomers. A wealth of choices. There are a lot of fine actors out there.”
While looking around, I came across Tor-Forge’s Fall 2010 Catalog (PDF). On page 47, what I suspect to be a draft of the cover art for the re-release of the first Wild Cards is on display in black and white,. It depicts the doomed, heroic character of Jetboy, a hero at the center of the release of the Wild Cards virus.
At a guess—I’ll remark on Twitter if I get confirmation—I believe the painting is by Michael Komarck, who has provided art for the new Wild Cards trilogy.
Charlotte Salt—who I recognize from the previous season of The Tudors, in which she played Lady Ursula Misseldon—has apparently posted her audition tape for the role of Daenerys (which HBO recently confirmed was recasting), or possibly a practice run for it, on YouTube. It’s an interesting look to how these audition tapes might look from other actresses.
Thanks to Abyss at Winter is Coming and Jonias Snow at the A Song of Ice and Fire forum for bringing it to our attention.
The A Song of Ice and Fire forum now includes the Tapatalk plugin, which provides greatly improved readability and usability of the forum for users of mobile phones (iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, and Android-based) who download the Tapatalk app. The plugin comes in a light, free version which allows reading but not posting, and a $2.99 version with posting and other features.
The regular mobile skin is still available, so the Tapatalk plugin is not nor ever will be mandatory for using the forum on a mobile platform.
The comment thread to GRRM’s post announcing the completion of the first draft has proved fruitful. He’s confirmed that so far as he knows, the character of Ros, “the Red-Headed Whore”—played by Esmé Bianco—is the only one added to the series so far who is not original to the novels, and reveals that she may appear in later episodes; having liked Ms. Bianco when he met her, he even floats the idea of including her character in the novels. Martin also makes this priceless remark, in regards to the script which he called “too long and too expensive”: “Too many characters, too many settings, too many SFX shots. What meathead wrote this novel, anyway?”
Later, however, Martin speaks seriously on the difficulty of adapting the series. He emphasizes that the first season is very faithful to the novel, but he anticipates increasing difficulty as the story spreads over a wider geographic area, with more and more characters introduced, some who may become prominent in later novels but who could well be cut when their role appears small. He can’t guarantee that the future seasons will be as faithful, but “the intent is there”.
The first draft of episode 8’s script is now in to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, according to GRRM, who says it’s “too long and too expensive” but that’s the case with all the first drafts of screenplays and teleplays he’s ever written. He notes that it is tentatively titled “The Pointy End”—a familiar phrase to A Song of Ice and Fire fans—but that it’s not been decided whether they’ll even use titles.
He finishes with a quote from King Kong, in reference to A Dance with Dragons: “He was a king in his world, but we’ll teach him fear…”
Sean Bean‘s starring in Black Death, a medieval action/horror film which opens late next month. The trailer’s just been released, and one notices that Bean probably looks pretty close to how he’ll look as Eddard Stark, beard and all:
Thanks, once again, to raijap for retweeting this one.
I’m not quite sure how she does it, but PDF-hunting wunderkind raijap has tracked down an interesting tidbit: an official document from the Center for Cinematography in Morocco, listing the productions spends of all significant projects filmed in Morocco in 2009. Of interest, of course, is the listing for Game of Thrones, which gives the spend as 2.7 million dirham (approxmately $320,000 USD). Of course, one supposes this figure relates purely to the hire of crew, extras, lots, and so on incurred in Morocco specifically, and may not cover the budget for foreign actors such as Jason Momoa, Tamzin Merchant, Iain Glen, or Ian McNeice.
This figure is—to my admittedly-amateur knowledge of such things—surprisingly lower than one would have expected, but may help to explain part of the reason filming will once more take place in Morocco (the other being, doubtless, the need to reshoot many of the Daenerys scenes following recasting of the role.)
Another noticeable piece, the naming of Dune Films as the local production company contracted to facilitate shooting. Dune Films has extensive credits, including having participated in the production of Kingdom of Heaven, Prince of Persia, and the soon to be released Inception.