Roger Ashton-Griffiths: When I Died on Game of Thrones

In honor of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, IGN is taking a look back at some of the iconic characters who’ve fallen along the way, and the lasting impact they had on the story. These heroes and villains may not have made it to the end of the road, but their lives weren’t in vain – they stand as a fitting reminder that when you play the game of thrones, you win, or you die.

Perhaps best known for all the colorful insults his mother, Lady Olenna, used to describe him, Mace Tyrell was a simple but well-meaning lord who left the scheming to his family members. Mace was outsmarted by all of those around him: his hilarious and conniving mother, his manipulative and power-hungry daughter Margaery, and his vengeful, fierce son Loras.

Not that it helped them, in the end. All the Tyrells’ combined smarts were no match for the force of crazy that is Cersei Lannister, and Mace proved to be a victim of her wrath more than any other named character on the show. Below, Roger Ashton-Griffiths recalls his dramatic demise in Part 11 of our retrospective series, “When I Died on Game of Thrones.”

What do you remember about filming your death scene?

It was a large scene, there were a lot of people – and a lot of people means a lot of time. And it’s not just about herding extras around and all that kind of stuff, because a lot of that comes into it. It was getting everybody ready; making sure everybody was in the right position; it was resetting everything. It was doing a thousand and one different angles, because of the way they knew it was going to be cut. Incidentally, I still think the editing of that scene is the best editing I have ever seen of anything, regardless of my involvement in it. So it took basically four days to shoot that scene.

And it was a scene in which it was necessary to be emotionally stressed. And so, essentially, on Monday morning, I and the others all went [makes gasping face] and we stayed like that for four days. So, it was utterly, utterly exhausting. But at the same time, it was rewarding and fascinating. I’d never died by wildfire before. And so, all these little things are quite interesting.

From the get-go, my character, like everybody else’s, had developed. I had arrived with no backstory whatsoever – and by the time I had finished, I’d constructed a complete backstory with Natalie [Dormer] and Finn [Jones] and with Diana [Rigg], as well. So, we had a sense of what our homeland was like, what we did there. We had, for example, a private zoo. And there were scenes in which I wore bespoke elephant buckles with the trunks meeting. And this is all part of building the backstory. So, it had become clear to me after three years what Mace was and what his interests were. And that scene is just the culmination of that. And the internal motivation for Mace, I discovered – because the characters do at times rather take you over, as an actor – I discovered that he was absolutely distraught at the thought of losing his children, of them dying, but found some small comfort in the fact that he would die with them – that they would all go together as a family. It was the ultimate expression of family togetherness.

For more from our “When I Died on Game of Thrones” series, be sure to watch Julian Glover reflecting back on the unexpectedly long life of Maester Pycelle.

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