What’s happening in the Game of Thrones universe lately? We’ve got all the details.
First off, exciting news for fans of the UK series Spooks (aka MI-5). Original star Peter Firth is going to star in a movie adaptation called Spooks: The Greater Good. But Thrones fans will be excited to learn Kit Harington and Zero Dark Thirty’s Jennifer Ehle will also be joining the cast.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, “The movie version of the series, which aired as MI-5 in the U.S., will be directed by Bharat Nalluri, the originating director on the TV series. The plot details the story of an agent (Harington) investigating how a terrorist escaped from custody during a routine handover against the ticking clock of an imminent terror attack on London.” Harrington is an ex-MI5 agent and the former protege of Harry Pearce. This makes me very happy.
Onto new casting for Game of Thrones itself, we previously heard word of The Magnar of Thenn, aka Styr, debuting in Season 4. We thought actor Joseph Gatt was a shoe-in for the role but now official word has come down through Entertainment Weekly naming Russian actor Yuri Kolokolnikov for Styr.
Finally, George R.R. Martin did a lengthy interview with The Sydney Morning Herald where he once again touched upon the pressure to write his A Song of Ice and Fire novels faster.
“It is great that so many people are eager for the next book and certainly these are the people who are paying my bills,” he told them. “But at the same time, sometimes I just wish they would stop pressuring me about it. It will be done when it’s done. I’m working on it. I don’t know what else I can say: I’m a slow writer, I’ve always been a slow writer, and these are gigantic books.”
But when he’s in the zone, he’s in the zone.
“When the writing is going really well, I do get lost in it, I almost live in it. It occupies the back of my head. I’m thinking about it constantly. I go to sleep thinking about it. I wake up thinking about it. I cross the street thinking about it – my office is across the street from my house,” he said, “I spend all day in Westeros and King’s Landing. The real world almost seems to fade away.”
But if you’re worried about the author finishing fast enough so the HBO series can still have the novels to pull from, best not actually show up at Martin’s house to distract him. Apparently, that’s happened more than once.
“Which is a little annoying,” he says. “Mostly they are fans and lovely people, but some of them show up with six-packs of beer and they just want to sit down and shoot the shit with me – which is nice, but if I am kicking off work every day to have beer with the fans, that’s not so good.”
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