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As one of the longest-serving (and surviving) cast members of Game Of Thrones, it must have come as something of an ego blow for Iain Glen to discover he was to be bumped off in the very first episode of his next drama, Delicious.
Luckily for Iain, the writers decided they wanted to keep his character in the show from beyond the grave.
And now he’s back for a second series of Delicious, which was Sky One’s highest rating original drama of last year.
Iain plays Leo, a celebrity chef who has an affair with his ex-wife, played by Dawn French, behind the back of his second wife (Emilia Fox).
A heart attack swiftly kills him in episode one, but Leo remains as a narrator, finally stepping back on screen in the last episode.
“My daughter had attempted suicide and came into ‘God’s waiting room’, where she had this imagined conversation with me,” says Iain, 56.
“The writers took that and have continued it into the new season. It feels like a quite unique conceit.”
Iain certainly isn’t used to being killed off so quickly. He has played Ser Jorah Mormont in Game Of Thrones for seven seasons without succumbing to deadly disease or bloodthirsty battle.
He says both shows have been great fun to film, so it wasn’t a difficult decision to rejoin the cast of Delicious for a second spin.
“It was hugely enjoyable filming in Cornwall and I’m very fond of Dawn and Emilia. It’s a lovely sensation as an actor to return to something that has gone down well, and to meet up with people and have that shared experience. I feel it on Thrones very acutely, but I definitely felt it on this, too.”
The food required for filming made life on set particularly enjoyable.
“There’s lots of nibbling going on at Delicious as they give us fantastic dishes to work with,” he says, although playing a chef hasn’t improved his skills in the kitchen.
“I’m a foodie in the sense that I love food and can eat enormous amounts of it and get away with it – much to the irritation of my wife. But I’m really moronic when it comes to creating meals. I don’t trust myself or have any instinct for it, so I laboriously follow a recipe to within an inch of its life and get very nervous about it,” he says.
“If I were asked to do one of those celebrity cooking shows it would be a clear, resounding no.”
It’s unlikely Iain will need to do any reality TV any time soon, though, having been on the receiving end of the ever-escalating salaries enjoyed by the Thrones cast.
The main stars are reportedly on up to seven figures per episode in the final season, though Iain would never be so vulgar as to entertain a conversation about pay packets.
“For me, success has never been about visibility or a recognition but the ability to have done enough to choose the parts you take,” he says.
“When I get into my sixties and seventies, it would be nice not to need to work – I know too many actors for whom life is very hard.”
So what was the secret to avoiding being brutally wiped out? “I’ve been sucking up to the writers when I’ve met them,” he jokes.
“Those of us who have survived – and Ser Jorah has teetered close to demise for quite a few seasons – do feel very lucky to have staggered to the final act.”
It probably helps that Iain hasn’t annoyed anyone by giving away any big plot twists over the years.
“I haven’t ever let anything slip,” he says.
“It’s quite fun because people ask so much that you start toying with them and then play along as if you’ve given something away, but deep down people don’t really want to know. They ask but it would just spoil it for them.”
Iain grew up in Edinburgh but didn’t discover acting until he was at the University Of Aberdeen, quickly dropping out to study at RADA – thankfully with the support of his mother and father.
“They’ve enjoyed a lot of theatre, TV and films I’ve made over the years,” he says. His career has included stints with the RSC, starring alongside Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room in London’s West End, plus roles in Downton Abbey, Ripper Street and the Resident Evil trilogy.
“My parents are still in Scotland, though they’re more fragile and less mobile than they were, so we tend to go to them more often than we did 10 years ago,” he says.
“I love returning to Edinburgh as it’s a great, quality life up there and I’m bombarded with memories from childhood.”
He even wonders if growing up north of the border may have given his career a boost.
“I feel fortunate in that I’m not associated with a particular class, which is massive in the UK,” he says.
“I’ve portrayed a range of good souls and bad souls and feel lucky not to be perceived too strongly as one or another. I don’t know if that’s to do with being a Scot working down here, although I don’t have a very pronounced accent. People love to pigeonhole actors in the UK, so it’s good I’ve managed to avoid that.”
Does he ever see himself moving back? “Well, I’ve married an English lady and we have built a life down here,” he
“We’ll see, but I think it feels unlikely right now. We’re very rooted where we are.”
The “English lady” in question is the actress Charlotte Emmerson, who Iain married this summer after 12 years together.
“I’m rather enjoying saying ‘my wife’,” he admits.
“I used to use it and [Charlotte] would say, ‘I’m not your wife.’ It was just shorthand really, but she told me not to, so it’s nice that now I can and not get corrected.”
The pair celebrated their nuptials with an intimate meal in a Georgian house near their home in London’s Dulwich Village.
“It was just as we wanted it, with only our immediate family, about 30 of us. The courses just kept coming and it was the most perfect realisation of what we hoped it would be.Then we took stock, waited a month or two and threw a big party for about 200 friends.
“It made sense to us to separate the two. Sometimes, when you put it all together it can be overwhelming and you lose the personal, small-scale intimacy of a marriage the way you want it, but you don’t want to not share it with friends.
It worked well and we managed to pick two of the hottest days of last summer.”
The couple already have two children together, Mary, 10, and Juliet, four. Iain also has a son, Finlay, 22, from a previous marriage.
The three still find their father being recognised in the street “kind of odd”.
“My 10 year old rather loved it when people asked for selfies, although she has started to become a little blasé. My littlest one doesn’t quite understand yet, while my eldest has ignored me as an actor in quite a healthy way and rarely watches stuff I’m in.”
It might make more sense once his girls are old enough to watch his most famous roles. “I did a voiceover for [Nick Jr cartoon series] Nella The Princess Knight, providing the voice of Santa, and a few years ago I did Kidnapped, the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, when Finlay was the right age to watch that.
It’s nice when you can do stuff they are able to enjoy.”
Source: The Express
Solicitors who take part provide the will writing service for local people and waive their usual fee, instead you are invited to make a voluntary donation to Will Aid which is then split between nine of the UK’s best-loved charities.
The service is always over-subscribed, so people who would like to make a will are urged to get in touch with their local participating solicitor as soon as possible to secure an appointment.
Our suggested voluntary donation for a basic Will Aid will is £95 for a single will and £150 for a pair of mirror wills.
In 2017, Will Aid raised more than £1 million for the vital work of its charity partners – ActionAid, Age UK, British Red Cross, Christian Aid, NSPCC, Save the Children, Sightsavers, SCIAF (Scotland) and Trocaire (Northern Ireland).
Source: Will Aid
Iain Glen has played Jorah Mormont on Game of Thrones for eight years. He knows how it all ends, and while he didn’t spill the beans while speaking to Metro, he did tease a final season that will test what fans think they know about the show. “For viewers who have fallen in love with the show over the course of 70 plus hours, you get very strong affiliations and [are] possessive as an audience,” he said. “I find that with things that transport me, you feel like it’s yours.”
Without really thinking it through too clearly, you do have aspirations, you’ve got desires for what or may not happen. The bottom line is I’m sure we’ll not please everyone across the board, but when we gathered for reading the scripts right at the beginning, there was a huge sense the writers had done a fantastic job, and a fantastic job for the series as a whole. It’s the same concoction which has always worked, full of surprises and tension. For my money, it will satiate. My hunch is it will go down incredibly well because they’re brilliant scripts.
Well, that’s reassuring…we think. Parts of it also echoes comments made not long ago by Kit Harington (Jon Snow). “I think a TV series that’s spanned eight, nine years is an incredibly difficult thing to end,” Harington said. “I think not everyone’s going to be happy, you know, and you can’t please everyone.”
And what of Jorah Mormont specifically? Was Glen happy with where his character ended up? “Absolutely. I was very, very satisfied.”
Even if Jorah dies in the first scene of season 8, he’s accomplished something few other characters have: survived to appear in every season of the show. After being on Game of Thrones that long, letting go was weird for Glen, and came in stages:
Those greenscreen shots may not be over, by the way. According, to Harington, that’s why he still hasn’t cut his Jon Snow hair.
But even if there are a few pickup shots left to do here and there, some things are over for good.“The one thing we won’t be doing anymore which I’ll miss profoundly is turning up on set and doing the work and reading the new scripts,” he said. “I have mixed feelings.”
Well, now we do too. Thanks, Glen.
Source: Winter is coming.net
Speaking to Metro.co.uk, Iain said: ‘In some ways, if you’ve loved deep down it’s never entirely… things can make you feel in spite of yourself. ‘I think he’s very happy to be back inside her good favour and that’s more important to him than a physical relationship if it’s one or the other.
‘I think he feels loved by her and I think he feels forgiven by her. That is what feels most important I think.
He was working for two seasons just to try and get that, and finally I think he felt like he achieved that – there’s a friendship there which is always there to begin with. So that’s been recovered and deepened I suppose. ‘But that being said, things can happen which could rekindle or change and affect. That maybe part of what’s to come, or it may not be.’ Could Jorah potentially cause a division in the Daenerys and Jon Snow alliance? We’ll have to wait and see.
Iain Glen is also starring in new film Dusty And Me, which follows a young man (Luke Newberry) who finds unlikely companionship in a runaway greyhound. Set in 1970s Yorkshire, Glen was drawn to the role through the comedic script which is a far cry from Game Of Thrones, playing dog keeper Mickey. ‘It was a lovely script,’ Iain said. ‘It just made me giggle. It’s a comedy set up north and most of the roles are quite comedic within. Certainly mine is the most comedic in some ways. Advertisementif(window.adverts) { adverts.addToArray({“pos”: “mpu_mobile_mid”}) } Advertisementif(window.adverts) { adverts.addToArray({“pos”: “mpu_tablet_mid”}) } ‘I play a very vain man who has one of the most appalling toupees that’s ever met the silver screen, but he fancies himself.’
There were precautions in place to deal with potentially troublesome mutts, having a number of back-up dogs ready and waiting. ‘I think there’s two or three dogs and they behaved variously throughout,’ Iain said. ‘When one was misbehaving it was just put back in its trailer and one was produced. ‘The various dogs had different qualities. I could be talking bollocks but I think this is right: There were ones who were good for racing, ones who were good for close-up doggy looks, and ones who were good at hitting their mark.’ Dusty & Me will be released in selected UK cinemas on 28 September and digital download on 1 October.
Source: The Metro
.@Dawn_French and Iain Glen on their #Delicious new series and industry sexism pic.twitter.com/leNF5Rrk4T
— Sky News (@SkyNews) December 28, 2017
He’s starred in Game Of Thrones and Delicious, but actor Iain Glen hasn’t forgotten his roots.
Luckily for Iain, the writers decided they wanted to keep his character in the show from beyond the grave.
And now he’s back for a second series of Delicious, which was Sky One’s highest rating original drama of last year.
Iain plays Leo, a celebrity chef who has an affair with his ex-wife, played by Dawn French, behind the back of his second wife (Emilia Fox).
A heart attack swiftly kills him in episode one, but Leo remains as a narrator, finally stepping back on screen in the last episode.
“My daughter had attempted suicide and came into ‘God’s waiting room’, where she had this imagined conversation with me,” says Iain, 56.
“The writers took that and have continued it into the new season. It feels like a quite unique conceit.”
Iain certainly isn’t used to being killed off so quickly. He has played Ser Jorah Mormont in Game Of Thrones for seven seasons without succumbing to deadly disease or bloodthirsty battle.
He says both shows have been great fun to film, so it wasn’t a difficult decision to rejoin the cast of Delicious for a second spin.
“It was hugely enjoyable filming in Cornwall and I’m very fond of Dawn and Emilia. It’s a lovely sensation as an actor to return to something that has gone down well, and to meet up with people and have that shared experience. I feel it on Thrones very acutely, but I definitely felt it on this, too.”
The food required for filming made life on set particularly enjoyable.
“There’s lots of nibbling going on at Delicious as they give us fantastic dishes to work with,” he says, although playing a chef hasn’t improved his skills in the kitchen.
“I’m a foodie in the sense that I love food and can eat enormous amounts of it and get away with it – much to the irritation of my wife. But I’m really moronic when it comes to creating meals. I don’t trust myself or have any instinct for it, so I laboriously follow a recipe to within an inch of its life and get very nervous about it,” he says.
“If I were asked to do one of those celebrity cooking shows it would be a clear, resounding no.”
It’s unlikely Iain will need to do any reality TV any time soon, though, having been on the receiving end of the ever-escalating salaries enjoyed by the Thrones cast.
The main stars are reportedly on up to seven figures per episode in the final season, though Iain would never be so vulgar as to entertain a conversation about pay packets.
“For me, success has never been about visibility or a recognition but the ability to have done enough to choose the parts you take,” he says.
“When I get into my sixties and seventies, it would be nice not to need to work – I know too many actors for whom life is very hard.”
So what was the secret to avoiding being brutally wiped out? “I’ve been sucking up to the writers when I’ve met them,” he jokes.
“Those of us who have survived – and Ser Jorah has teetered close to demise for quite a few seasons – do feel very lucky to have staggered to the final act.”
It probably helps that Iain hasn’t annoyed anyone by giving away any big plot twists over the years.
“I haven’t ever let anything slip,” he says.
“It’s quite fun because people ask so much that you start toying with them and then play along as if you’ve given something away, but deep down people don’t really want to know. They ask but it would just spoil it for them.”
Iain grew up in Edinburgh but didn’t discover acting until he was at the University Of Aberdeen, quickly dropping out to study at RADA – thankfully with the support of his mother and father.
“They’ve enjoyed a lot of theatre, TV and films I’ve made over the years,” he says. His career has included stints with the RSC, starring alongside Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room in London’s West End, plus roles in Downton Abbey, Ripper Street and the Resident Evil trilogy.
“My parents are still in Scotland, though they’re more fragile and less mobile than they were, so we tend to go to them more often than we did 10 years ago,” he says.
“I love returning to Edinburgh as it’s a great, quality life up there and I’m bombarded with memories from childhood.”
He even wonders if growing up north of the border may have given his career a boost.
“I feel fortunate in that I’m not associated with a particular class, which is massive in the UK,” he says.
“I’ve portrayed a range of good souls and bad souls and feel lucky not to be perceived too strongly as one or another. I don’t know if that’s to do with being a Scot working down here, although I don’t have a very pronounced accent. People love to pigeonhole actors in the UK, so it’s good I’ve managed to avoid that.”
Does he ever see himself moving back? “Well, I’ve married an English lady and we have built a life down here,” he says.
“We’ll see, but I think it feels unlikely right now. We’re very rooted where we are.”
The “English lady” in question is the actress Charlotte Emmerson, who Iain married this summer after 12 years together.
“I’m rather enjoying saying ‘my wife’,” he admits.
“I used to use it and [Charlotte] would say, ‘I’m not your wife.’ It was just shorthand really, but she told me not to, so it’s nice that now I can and not get corrected.”
The pair celebrated their nuptials with an intimate meal in a Georgian house near their home in London’s Dulwich Village.
“It was just as we wanted it, with only our immediate family, about 30 of us. The courses just kept coming and it was the most perfect realisation of what we hoped it would be.Then we took stock, waited a month or two and threw a big party for about 200 friends.
“It made sense to us to separate the two. Sometimes, when you put it all together it can be overwhelming and you lose the personal, small-scale intimacy of a marriage the way you want it, but you don’t want to not share it with friends.
It worked well and we managed to pick two of the hottest days of last summer.”
The couple already have two children together, Mary, 10, and Juliet, four. Iain also has a son, Finlay, 22, from a previous marriage.
The three still find their father being recognised in the street “kind of odd”.
“My 10 year old rather loved it when people asked for selfies, although she has started to become a little blasé. My littlest one doesn’t quite understand yet, while my eldest has ignored me as an actor in quite a healthy way and rarely watches stuff I’m in.”
It might make more sense once his girls are old enough to watch his most famous roles. “I did a voiceover for [Nick Jr cartoon series] Nella The Princess Knight, providing the voice of Santa, and a few years ago I did Kidnapped, the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, when Finlay was the right age to watch that.
It’s nice when you can do stuff they are able to enjoy.”
They’ll certainly have quite the back catalogue to catch up on when they reach their late teens.
Source: The Express
Then again, considering his character Jorah Mormont was saved from an excruciating death by greyscale, any alternative ending would probably seem pretty dope.
Speaking to The Indian Express, the fella who has played Daenerys Targaryen’s (Emilia Clarke) most devoted servant said “when I read it, I thought it was rather brilliant.
“I am a bit of a fan of the series as well, and it satiated my expectation and hopes,” he added, but noted that not everyone will be pleased with how the endeavour wraps up.
“All I can say is that we will be doing what we have done before and the writers have written great episodes. They have had a great strike rate up to now and I am sure that will continue,” Glen said.
Basically, Glen knows, and we don’t, and we’re mad about it.
Game Of Thrones‘ final season will arrive in 2019.
Source: Pedestrian
