A generous portion of King's Landing went up in flames in the Game of Thrones season finale, taking an equally generous portion of the show's cast with it. The first casualty, Lancel Lannister, the squire who became Cersei's lover and later, a religious fanatic, discovered her stash of wildfire beneath the Great Sept of Baelor just seconds before it incinerated him.
Eugene Simon, who plays Lancel, was one of the few members of the original Thrones cast still employed as of Season 6; though unseen in Seasons 3 and 4, his character had an important role from the show's inception. "He has done a great deal to upset the outcome of King's Landing very dramatically," says Simon. "He kills Robert Baratheon on Cersei's behalf, he is Cersei's lover for the longest time—one of the things that will ultimately result in her undoing—he fights in the Battle of the Blackwater and is rejected by his family…He has a big story to tell but the limited amount of screen time that he gets on Game of Thrones to tell it is representative of how he is perceived by his peers."
Simon's last day on set reflects the ignominy of his character; the actor spent hours crawling along a dungeon floor in a castle in Belfast using just his arms, his character paralyzed after one of Cersei's child spies stabs him in the back. "It was exhausting, it was bloody, it was sweaty, it was wet, it was dark, it was everything Game of Thrones is and more," says Simon with a laugh. Below, he talks to HarpersBAZAAR.com about his initial reaction to Cersei's plot, his favorite Lancel scene and more:
Harper's BAZAAR: What did you think when you received the script for this episode?
Eugene Simon: I was absolutely blown away, literally. There's no other words to describe it. It was an explosive first read. I remember when we were doing a script read at the very start of shooting Season 6, I sat down with Jonathan Pryce, he was to my left. He didn't know he was actually going to die this season. He wants to wait to read [the script]. And when we both read the scene where the explosion goes off, Jonathan just set out a great big "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!" [Laughs] It was pretty extraordinary.
HB: What was your reaction?
ES: Well, Dan [Weiss] and David [Benioff] had kindly called me beforehand to let me know that Lancel's time had finally come, which was very kind of them to do. And I told them, "The way you're describing his death, I just want to say 'thank you' for everything you've done over the past few years and thank you for being so generous with how you have chosen Lancel to go out this season. It means a great deal to me." And it still does.
HB: So you do think it's a fitting death for him?
ES: I certainly think the grandeur of it was greatly appreciated. I think Lancel has had a wonderful run in this show and I'm so happy that I've been able to tell it. So I think it was fitting, yeah. It felt very generous of them to give it to me.
HB: Yeah, you could've had your face crushed in by The Mountain!
ES: Yeah, exactly! So many people suspected Lancel was gonna have his head ripped off, but no. Lancel was made for bigger things.
HB: It's been a huge season for him. Lancel is really a fanatic within the Faith. Was there any point this season, given what he witnessed, when his faith was shaken?
ES: When we were filming the last moments of Lancel's life, in my mind I wanted to make sure it was a definite show of vulnerability. Lancel deals with pain in quite a stoic fashion and he is quite composed in his delivery of himself to anyone. But when he's on the ground, paralyzed, bleeding, alone, in the deepest parts of the Sept of Baelor, he's frightened again, and he hasn't felt frightened for long time. And he is terrified and vulnerable and nervous and sad, sad that this is how things are going for him. As the actor, you always want the scenes to last twice as long so you can really give the audience a chance to see all that goes into making scenes like that. But the main point was to show he was vulnerable and he was scared again, so there was still something human left in him.
HB: Was that the last scene you shot?
ES: I believe it was. It's funny, the last few days of filming were such a blur, but yes, I'm fairly certain that was the last day.
HB: What was that day like?
ES: We were up against the clock so much. We'd been working so hard, and [director] Miguel Sapochnik, who has done the two most extraordinary episodes of Game of Thrones to date, in my opinion, was working incredibly hard. Long hours. So it was just me with the young actor who stabs Lancel in the back down in the crypt of this enormous castle just outside of Belfast. We saw about 300 bats down the end of this corridor, so the length of that corridor you saw is not CGI, it's genuinely that long, a 300-400 meter-long tunnel. We were really working our asses off. It's really difficult to pull yourself along the ground without moving your legs for an entire day. By the end of the day my upper body was just ripped! [Laughs] I had to drag my own body weight for eight to 10 hours.
HB: You really got that first blast of Wildfire.
ES: He was totally and utterly eviscerated by it.
HB: What do you think of your character's trajectory? He's been through a lot over the past six seasons.
ES: Lancel has astounded me as a character because in some ways, he's never been able to show you quite who he is at any given point. It's funny, some people view him in the first couple of seasons as being craven and a bit of a coward. I don't view him that way. I seem him as more of a Tommen figure in the first two seasons. He's young, he's a boy, he's trying to grow, he's frightened of the world he lives in, he's trying to adapt to it to become a Lannister and the embers of ambition are within him, but they're snuffed out by those around him. They use him and overwhelm him for their own means. In that sense I felt very, very strongly about Lancel, because I didn't want him to be forgotten as the boy who never amounted to much. He amounted to a great deal. I took his storyline very personally and it meant a great deal to me. I focused on it with everything I could. It's quite emotional, I suppose, because I've been telling his story since I was 18 years old, and I find quite a strange and very deep experience.
HB: You could call him a victim of this world he lives in. In order to survive, he's pulled into all these different situations. He causes Robert Baratheon's death, he sleeps with Cersei, he's involved in the Battle of the Blackwater, then he gets involved with the Faith. He's much more integral to the plot than would appear on the surface.
ES: He is! He's easily put to one side and forgotten. I know it sounds unlikely, but I would say even at a young age of 18, the way Lancel had been presented to you was very deliberate. I had this in mind, I wanted Lancel to be looked down on and thought little of, and then have him return in a really, really special way. I've never really wanted to say it because it sounds too bold, but this was part of my plan and I'm very happy that it worked out.
HB: Was it weird to make the transition from this strong, chivalrous knight to someone completely controlled by his devotion?
ES: Yeah, it was. The most interesting aspect of it was that Lancel is also a man when you see him in Seasons 5 and 6 and he was a boy in the first two. And on top of that, the hardest thing about Lancel is you have to do a lot of the guesswork yourself as to what he is thinking, and to do that requires a stoicism and a sense of real emotional depth. It's a funny thing to play with that sort of emotion as an actor, to keep it all bubbling beneath the surface. But what we did see and what I'm happy about with Lancel is that when he confronts Cersei before The Mountain rips off his colleague's head, he is actually, if you look, going back to enjoying himself. There's the smallest of smiles on his face. And I found that I was getting excited by the idea of Lancel re-finding himself and not just being dead and stoic. Some degree of humanity returned to him. And his last act of humanity is his fear and vulnerability at the notion that he's about to die. So it's a sort of complete circle for me.
HB: What was your favorite scene to shoot in the four seasons you appeared on the show?
ES: I can't pick a favorite—I just can't! But I would say I did worship filming my first confrontation with Tyrion in Season 2. That scene, I found it such a lovely experience and such an intense baptism by fire. And everything after that—Season 5 when Lancel confronts Cersei with his revolutionized personality—was very interesting for me because it was something new. I had never done that before! I had never played someone who really was in a deep form of trauma, a psychological problem, as he was. And to do that, I found myself very invested. When you get jobs like that, you can at first feel that you're maybe in over your head, but then you focus, you center yourself, you practice, practice, practice and then, you do it! It's a gamble between the Tyrion scene and the Cersei scene in Season 5.
HB: What's next for you?
ES: The reason I came back from Australia to London, where I am now, is because I'm about to help re-open a little theater in London. It's called The Ovalhouse Theatre and it's for young actors who are trying to get into acting. Also, from the limited number of the Syrian refugees the British government has taken, we have a number of Syrian actors who are gonna come and get involved. So that's my focus at the moment, that's why I'm back in London. On top of that... It's funny, I had a number of roles for rather mentally unstable characters come through recently [laughs] so it's been a weird coincidence. Once I know what's happening with those jobs, I'll put it out on Twitter for you.
HB: Who do you want to see on the Iron Throne?
ES: Well I have a feeling that it will be Jon Snow. I think in all likelihood Jon Snow will end up on the Throne in the end. I don't know why, I just have a feeling. There is also two other possibilities. The first is that the Iron Throne will be destroyed—I'm not giving anything away, by the way. I know nothing, this is just my theory. The Iron Throne will possibly be destroyed. I have a feeling that it's such a redundant, symbolic throne now, I don't know how much value it really has. And I don't think Daenerys will be on the throne. She's a fantastic conqueror, but I'm not sure how good a leader she is. We'll have to wait and see.
Julie Kosin is the senior culture editor of ELLE.com, where she oversees all things movies, TV, books, music, and art, from trawling Netflix for a worthy binge to endorsing your next book club pick. She's the former director of audience strategy and entertainment at HarpersBAZAAR.com. When not glued to her laptop, she can be found taking pictures of her dog or haunting used bookstores.
