MEFCC 2017: Winter is coming and with it the end of an era for Game of Thrones star

Liam Cunningham, who plays Ser Davos Seaworth, tells us how things have changed now the hit HBO show is approaching its end, and how he expects to struggle to find another role that is even half as good.

Liam Cunningham gets ready to meet fans and sign autographs at Middle East Film and Comic Con 2017. Courtesy MEFCC

Could Game of Thrones be about to lose one of its longest-serving characters in yet another grisly twist?

Season 7 of the popular fantasy will begin in July, and star Liam Cunningham – who has played loyal knight and trusted adviser Ser Davos Seaworth since season two and is one of the increasingly rare survivors since then – was in a teasing mood when we talked to him at the Middle East Film and Comic Con at the weekend.

“Well, at the End of season six I was still alive, so I’ll certainly be beginning season 7,” he says. “Whether I’ll last it out or not remains to be seen.”

Whether Ser Davos survives until the end or not, he – and the rest of the cast – soon will be looking for new work. The show – which has already overtaken the published volumes of author George R Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series, on which it is based – will end in 2018 with season eight.

Cunningham admits the prospect of the imminent ending of the show, which began in 2011, is a strange feeling, for the younger cast members in particular.

“Look at Sophie Turner [who plays Sansa] and Maisie [Williams, who plays Arya],” he says. “They started when they 13, so they’ve been doing this almost half their lives, and gone from schoolgirls to international stardom.

“There will be a large smack in the mouth of reality when it all comes to an end because it’s unique and unrepeatable.”

But even a veteran of film and television such as 55-year-old Cunningham admits he, too, will find it a wrench to leave a show on which he has had such a good working experience.

“I expect to spend the rest of my career just chasing something that’s even 50 or 60 per cent as good as Game of Thrones,” he says.

“When you walk onto the set of something like this that’s beautifully filmed, beautifully written, and not condescending to its audience or cheap and nasty so you feel insulted watching it, you really don’t want to drop beneath that level.

“So you find yourself turning down a lot of jobs, and a lot of money, because it’s not what you want to do. You want to keep the quality up, and people come to expect that level of quality from you.”

He has managed to find a few choice roles, however.

“Although I’m having to say no a lot I’ve done a couple of things,” he says. “I had a great little art-house film at Venice with Robert Pattinson [The Childhood of a Leader, based on Jean Paul Sartre’s 1939 novel of the same name] about the rise of fascism – talk about timely.

“So when I get something like that that I can really get my teeth into, that’s great for me and it’s what I’ve tried to do for my entire career.”

For now, though, his main focus is on Game of Thrones, and the actor admits that the sense that they are heading into the home straight had an effect on filming.

“We did fewer episodes this time – seven instead of 10 – which has given us a bit more leeway in terms of things like cinematography, which takes a lot of time,” he says.

“I haven’t seen any completed episodes yet, but what I have seen is some of the locations and new studio set ups and so onand they have been just amazing, really beautiful.

“They’ve really pushed the envelope as much as they can because they know at this stage, there’s an aspect of legacy. There’s a sense that everyone wants to walk away from this and be able to look in the mirror and say we did the best we possibly, possibly could.

“There’s a real genuine love of getting everything absolutely right, which is rare in this business.”

Game of Thrones has been one of the biggest TV phenomena, not only of recent years but of all time, and as its popularity has grown and the cast have become so well known it must havebecome harder to maintain the required levels of secrecy, especially when filming in Northern Ireland, one of its main locations.

“There’s definitely some madness – but Northern Ireland isn’t the worst,” he says. “Spain was insane. We had to bring private security in. They [the fans] had broken into our hotel and were running around trying to find us.

“It’s like being in One Direction, which is insane. I’m nearly a pensioner and we’ve got young girls running around screaming. It’s kind of a dream and a nightmare at the same time.

“But you just have to look at it the right way. It’ll be back to obscurity in a couple of years, so you just have to take it for what it is.”