It’s Friday. Time for a roundup of what Game of Thrones cast and crew members are up to before you speed into the weekend. Let’s start with Peter Dinklage, who’s still making the rounds to promote My Dinner with Hervé, where he plays Fantasy Island star Hervé Villechaize. He had a free-wheeling, sort of halting conversation with Stephen Colbert where they discuss everything from Villechaize’s influence to the final season of Game of Thrones to, unexpectedly, how Thrones fans compare to fans of Fifty Shades of Grey:
So, some context: in My Dinner with Hervé, Dinklage stars alongside Jamie Dornan, who plays kinky corporate CEO Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades series. Those movies, if you aren’t aware, are about Grey’s relationship with Anastasia Steele, a university student-turned-S&M enthusiast-turned wife and mother, played by Dakota Johnson. “I read some of the screenplay in our dressing room,” Dinklage says. “He had to do some reshoots for Fifty Shades and I would help him out learning lines. I read the Dakota Johnson parts…I nailed it.”
Cue a zinger from Colbert: “I think that’s one of the lines.” That’s why he has this job, folks.
Anyway, at one point, Colbert opined that there were similarities between Game of Thrones fans and Fifty Shades fans, and Dinklage objected. “Very different fans,” he said. “I think Game of Thrones fans would take issue with comparing the two. Because Game of Thrones fans are very specific and lovely. Fifty Shades fans have issues. It’s all very suppressed issues, I think.”
Is it just me or does he seem a little nervous when talking about this, like he’s afraid the fans will come after him? But the jokes on them: Dinklage doesn’t have social media. Get around THAT.
Dinklage said absolutely nothing of substance about Game of Thrones season 8 — he’s been doing this for too long to slip up — but did field Colbert’s question about whether the show has a happy ending. “Suuuuure.”
Let’s leave that there and move on.
Have you heard the rumor that Joe Jonas, of the Jonas Brothers, might make a cameo in the final season of Game of Thrones? I haven’t either, but Variety must have heard something, because it asked the actor/singer about it earlier this week. “I would have done it in a heartbeat, but unfortunately, it’s not going to happen,” Jonas said. “That would have been amazing. I would have loved it.”
Jonas is engaged to Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark), so he’s tapped in to the goings-on behind the scenes…or not. “I can’t wait for it to come back and I don’t want to know any spoilers,” he said. “Sophie won’t tell me and she knows if she told me I would be so heartbroken because I’m such a big fan of the show. I’d be pissed.”
PARIS, FRANCE – OCTOBER 02: Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas attend the Louis Vuitton show as part of the Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Spring/Summer 2019 on October 2, 2018 in Paris, France. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)
Speaking of Game of Thrones’ leading ladies, Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell) spoke to Harper’s Bazaar about how she’d like the show to end. “I would like humanity to be saved please,” she laughed. “It’s really just that in a nutshell – that humanity was saved against the White Walkers. I’m hoping for a continuation of humanity in Westeros if possible.” That’s little enough to ask…right?
Dormer has very busy since her time on Thrones ended, and is currently working on a TV show about the life of Gone With the Wind star Vivien Leigh. “She’s an incredible woman,” Dormer said. “She just grabbed me because this screen siren is just so misunderstood. The bones of what we’re trying to do is present how brave she was in battling an incredibly intense bipolar condition. We’re coming at it from a mental health stance, how her pain and struggle was also, in a mad paradox, the secret to some of her genius. It was a gift as well as a burden.”
It’s inspiring looking at a woman, especially back in those days, who was disempowered by a chauvinist studio system and the afflictions of a potent bipolar condition, but still succeeded anyway. With the number of female-focused dramas on screen at the moment, that I would like to think that a story like this will speak very strongly both to those who know who Vivien Leigh is [and] to those who don’t. Yes, it’s glamorous and beautiful to look at by the nature of it, but there’s also some very modern messages there too. I hope that it’ll only be a short time in development.
Dormer is still looking for a distributor for the project, and we hope she finds one, because it sounds extremely watchable. And in the meantime, she can always star in vaguely Game of Thrones-themed coffee commercials alongside George Clooney:
Elsewhere, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin took to his Not a Blog to celebrate the release of a new line of Funko Pop! figures: the creators, modeled after himself and Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss.
“I suspect that this is the only time I will ever be as tall as David Benioff,” he quips. Take what you can get; that’s what I say.
Finally, Emilia Clarke’s birthday is a few days away, on October 23. One of Clarke’s friends — rozzie_roo_cakes of Instagram — is getting a jump on the big day by giving her a dragon-themed cake:
Many happy returns…on Tuesday.
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