We warned you about spoilers… Harry Lloyd’s precocious would-be monarch Viserys Targaryen pipped Ned Stark (Sean Bean) to the, er, crown for Season One’s most shocking death, having boiling liquid gold poured onto his head by Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa). Unlike Ned Stark’s beheading, many viewers were glad to see the end of Viserys’ increasingly vile and erratic behaviour in Game Of Thrones.
Actor Harry Lloyd, though, doesn’t worry too much about the audience perception of his character.
“I don’t really think about it to be honest, I love him, or I did before he met his sticky end,” said Lloyd exclusively to SciFiNow. “I think it’s a job whoever you’re playing, goodie or a baddie – these are outside words that aren’t very helpful. You do these things, and you’ve got to try and find reasons to make it work.
“If you can find a way to do these things that are so extreme and horrible that people can come round to his twisted way of thinking, you’ve probably done your job well because no-one’s good, bad, everyone’s doing something for a reason – that’s how you’ve got to approach it, I guess.”
Harry Lloyd’s methodology boarders on method acting, and there are layers to his take on Viserys Targaryen that aren’t visible on screen. Harry Lloyd wasn’t pretending to be Viserys, he was as close to being Viserys as one could possibly get.
“Oh yeah, yeah,” agreed Lloyd. “I got stuck in with my Targaryren family trees and Wikipedia. I found it really helpful, because he’s got this whole world of how he should be king – it’s a separate show to everyone else, in his show he’s the main part and he’s very important. In the actual show… not quite as true.
“That’s why it’s important for me to understand in ‘my show’ all the Targaryen stuff that no-one else needs to know about, but I’ve got to feel very confident in what I’m doing and what I’m saying, and why I need to treat her [Daenerys] like this. After you’ve got all that in your head, when someone starts going ‘No, no, I don’t want to go and marry this person’, it’s very easy to think ‘you don’t understand anything’.”
Game Of Thrones Season 2 begins April 2 on Sky Atlantic HD.
More Game Of Thrones on SciFiNow
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- Game Of Thrones Season 2 exclusive: Ygritte “has a lot of fun teasing Jon Snow”
- Game Of Thrones Season 2 has “masses of action and sword fights”
- Game Of Thrones Season 2’s Jeyne Westerling is different from the book
