Game Of Thrones Season 2: The truth about Tywin Lannister

Game Of Thrones Season 2 Tywin Lannister — Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance) in the first season of HBO's Game Of Thrones

Introduced in episode seven of Game Of Thrones Season 1, the powerful Lannister patriarch Tywin stepped in to try and clean up the mess caused by the escalating Stark/Lannister feud. The icy lord of Castery Rock calmly and methodically skinning a deer as he put Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) in his place.

“It took me two days to get the smell of that off my hands actually,” laughed actor Charles Dance at the launch party for the Complete First Season DVD/Blu-ray. “I thought they would have given me a haunch of venison to take home, but they didn’t. It was fun.”

As the war heats up and Tywin settles into the role of commander and power behind the Iron Throne in Season 2, we’ll start to get a better idea of what makes this master manipulator tick.

“You see a little of what’s behind the rather austere exterior, actually,” teases Dance, “that’s he’s not quite the bastard that you think he is.”

With memorable genre roles in Alien3, Last Action Hero and Sky’s recent Terry Pratchett adaptations where he plays the equally patrician, er, Patrician under his belt, Charles Dance shrugs off the suggestion that there’s any pressure in embodying this complex figure.

“There’s no pressure at all, not at all, why should there be pressure?” he says playfully. “I walk on a set and pretend to be somebody else, and hopefully I do it convincingly.

“We seem to be battling weather a lot of the time,” the actor continues, “but we’re going to start earlier this year I think, because last year and the year before, we ran into an awful lot of snow, very cold and wet. There aren’t any huge challenges really, it’s just great fun to do.

Game Of Thrones Season 2 begins April 2 on Sky Atlantic HD.