Full spoilers for Game of Thrones continue up through its Season 6 finale, "The Winds of Winter," below.
King's Landing isn't going to be the same when Game of Thrones returns in Season 7. Thanks to a plot by Cersei Lannister to overthrow the High Sparrow and Faith Militant, many of the key power players in the capitol of Westeros met with a fiery death in the explosion of the Sept of Baelor.
One of those many victims was Lancel Lannister, who tried so hard to prevent Mad King Aerys Targaryen's secret stash of wildfire from being set alight. Eugene Simon, the actor who played Lancel, got on the phone to talk about his climactic sendoff and discuss the repercussions of Cersei's power play for the Iron Throne.
IGN: What was that phone call from showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff like when you found out that Lancel would meet his end?
Eugene Simon: Before I got the phone call I got the e-mail asking to have a phone call. It was the letter of death that confirmed my suspicions. I don't know about any other actors, but I for one was absolutely fine with it. I spoke to them on the phone, they both were absolutely lovely, and they said, "We have a huge scene coming up at the end of episode 10 which Lancel is at the very center of and is pivotal in some of the action of." They then explained it to me, and I just said, "Boys, for everything that you've done for the last six years, thank you. This is a wonderful way to go. I really, really appreciate it, and I look forward to doing it for you." And here we are.
IGN: It's been a really interesting arc for Lancel from the beginning. What do you think about it ultimately being Cersei who kills Lancel after everything they've been through?
Simon: Cersei, over the course of these seasons, has found herself to be really the supervillain of the show in so many ways. We as the audience follow how she transitions to becoming so apathetic to how brutal she is towards those who don't play by her rules. In that sense she's lost a great deal of her humanity, and yet we all cling to who she is as a character.
For Lancel to be someone who has fallen victim to her rather nuclear option, it's funny, I never really felt -- as the actor or as Lancel -- any particular venom... Well, as the actor let's say, not the character. [I never felt] any particular venom towards it because I just thought it creates an even more brilliant storyline for the Lannister household. This is not giving anything away, this is just my gut instinct, but I have a feeling that Cersei is in for a very rough ride next season.
IGN: What do you think about the fact that she was ultimately responsible for Tommen's death and the way he ended up going out? I know you and Dean-Charles Chapman are pretty close.
Simon: It's just one of the horrible bits of collateral damage that comes from doing what she's done. I worship, worship Dean. I affectionately call him the "Cockney King of Westeros" because of his brilliant accent. Dean's character, in a similar way to Lancel before Lancel became a member of the Faith Militant, is living in a world that he can't fully compute. He's an innocent, in a lot of ways, trying his very hardest to be strong.
For what it's worth, I think there's a close identity between Tommen and Seasons 1 and 2 Lancel. Tommen just happens to be someone who was made king. Both Tommen and Lancel are the victims of Cersei's rather mad sense of ambition, I think.
IGN: So many major characters died in the Sept of Baelor explosion. Were you on set with the rest of the group when that happened? Did you all get any sort of send off party?
Simon: Jonathan Pryce finished his very last scene of the show in the Sept of Baelor, right before the explosion goes off, so we had a very big nice round of applause when that took place. I remember that scene very well; we had 200 or so supporting actors in there, all of whom were so committed. They stayed there all day and did wonderful reactions to all the really intense bits. When the first part of the bomb goes off, all of them really, really [performed] that there was a full-on nuclear explosion going on underneath them.
We did, we had a big round of applause and celebration after that scene was done because I think we all knew it was going to be pretty monumentous. We said goodbye to countless Tyrells, Kevan Lannister my father, the High Sparrow and dozens of other. It was a pretty extraordinary day.
IGN: Did you have any idea the direction where this was going to go at the beginning of the season?
Simon: I never really gave much thought to whether or not Lancel was going to die, at least when we were in pre-production for Season 6. The first thing I knew from Dan and David was that Lancel was going to die this season, before I even got the scripts. They were sweet enough to give me the call. It was very funny, there were a number of actors that didn't know that they were going to die. I remember when we were doing a read-through of lots of cast members in Belfast for Season 6. Jonathan was sat right next to me playing the High Sparrow, and when we had the scene where the High Sparrow gets eviscerated narrated to us, Jonathan just went, "Nooooooo!" in the middle of the read-through. It really, really made me laugh a lot. So I think some people's deaths were a surprise to them; mine was not.
IGN: What were some of the directions you were getting from Miguel Sapochnik toward the end of Lancel's arc? That scene with the wildfire was so meticulously directed.
Simon: Miguel's very thorough, for one thing. He does get the scene from every single angle. He's extraordinarily hard-working, but toward the end of the season we were really up against it. There was a possibility we were going to go into January in terms of filming because there was so much to do, but he just knuckled down and absolutely hit the ball out of the park in that respect.
We discussed it very limitedly, but really the note was when Lancel was dragging his body, there was a sense of someone who is trying to put aside their pain of being stabbed and being paralyzed as much as possible in order to try to defend what little hope there is left of trying to save the sept and also to save their life. It really only comes down to the very last few nanoseconds of footage that you realize the cause is lost.
Even though the way they filmed it, Miguel was so good, I thought, with choosing the music in this episode. I just thought it matched perfectly. The composer did a wonderful job of really creating the suspense of the scene. The silence that fell those few seconds before the candle hit the wildfire were just, for me, I felt, phenomenal. I thought they were just brilliantly done. He directed it in exactly the vision he saw, while simultaneously getting it from every angle. So, all the credit to him. He's an extraordinary director.
IGN: It's a bit terrifying that Cersei went a step beyond the Mad King and used the wildfire against her people in King's Landing. Do you think she's full Mad Queen Cersei, full villain, at this point?
Simon: I think Cersei has lost any moral credibility. She doesn't really have a leg to stand on, and really what she's in for now is her own survival. She would literally burn the entire of Westeros to the ground in order to survive, so it is a madness -- an unstoppable madness of a Targaryen magnitude. So yes, I think she is just as bad as the father of Daenerys Targaryen if not worse, because she doesn't really have an extroverted demonstration to plead. I don't think she'd plead insanity in court. I think a psychiatrist would have to be brought in to really determine the full extent of her trauma.
IGN: If only there was anyone left to do that in Westeros!
Simon: Exactly, exactly. The only one who could, horrifyingly, was the High Sparrow. He's the only one who had a really good chance of breaking her, and sadly he's -- like Lancel -- been eviscerated.
IGN: You might be a little bit biased because you were so close to the storyline, but do you think the High Sparrow was really out to do good in Westeros, or was he out for his own power?
Simon: You know, it's funny, I'm not biased actually. I'm really not. I actually have quite a critical view of the Faith Militant, because they are a rather hypocritical establishment. They do use the aristocratic members of the Seven Kingdoms as puppets for their political motivations. There was even a point where I started to suspect, in looking at the High Sparrow as a character, whether he was even religious at all, whether he just used the nature of the Faith's ideology to instigate some degree of political reform that the people would have to adhere to because they're afraid of the magic man in the sky.
It goes back to that riddle Varys tells in one of the first two seasons. "There's a sellsword in front of three men: a king, a priest and a rich man. Which one has the power? Well, it's whichever you think does." The High Sparrow understands the nature of power and, to put it bluntly, he almost seems too intelligent to believe some of the weird and more dogmatic natures of the Faith.
IGN: Yeah, it was the lesser of two evils for a bit. And now we have Cersei, who I think we can all objectively agree is going to be a terrible ruler. You even see it on Jaime's face when he gets back to King's Landing and he's like "what happened..."
Simon: Yeah! Again, I know nothing. I don't think the scripts have even been written yet. But I have a feeling that Jaime and Cersei's relationship is going to be really... well, it might even crumble. He is not insane; he's just in love. Whereas she is in love with something else -- herself, or something. I'm not sure what it is.
IGN: Looking forward, do you have any bets on how the series is going to end? We're pretty close to wrapping things up at this point.
Simon: In terms of who I'd like to end on the throne, it would be Tyrion or Jon. I like both those characters. For some reason, I do believe that Daenerys Targaryen is in trouble. Again, no hints being given. I know nothing, but my gut instinct tells me Daenerys -- I don't know why, I just feel like she's in trouble. There's something about the nature of this sort of storytelling that sometimes demands the sacrifice of the heroic, archangel-like figure. We'll have to wait and see, maybe I'm wrong.
IGN: You've made it farther than most on this series! Looking back, do you have any memory that stands out to you as your favorite?
Simon: I just have dozen of fun memories. I really do, and all of them run in front of me like a tapestry of fond, dreamlike memories. Everything from being in armor in King's Landing in Season 2 covered in fake blood that turned sticky, pissing with rain in the Belfast winter with Jack Gleeson and Peter Dinklage doing impressions of the honey badger YouTube clip, followed by small things like the smell.
The smells are very strong on Game of Thrones: the incense, the fire, the heat of all the burns. The smell of Lancel's Faith Militant cloth is very thick in my nostrils right now. And I think the warmth of it all; the hard work ethics, the ambiance, the temperature of the set. There are so many sensory memories of it, which will never leave me.
Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.
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