[caption id="attachment_70506" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="In HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” Lady Catelyn Stark, played by Michelle Fairley, tries to maintain her family’s ideals in a treacherous world. "]
Northern Irish actress Michelle Fairley said she was instantly gripped by the blood-soaked story of political intrigue and family treachery the moment she picked up her first script for “Game of Thrones,” the celebrated HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's “A Song of Ice and Fire” series of fantasy novels.
“I thought: ‘Wow! This is an amazing, complicated, dark, twisted world that all these different characters inhabit and somehow they all fit together,’” Fairley told the Irish Echo in a recent phone interview. “And then once I started to read the books, I realized there is so much history between them all. It’s a proper world. It’s a real world with absolute history and family allegiances and vengeance and death and, in the middle of it, you have these incredibly strong women who appear to be wives, mothers, nurturers, carers, providers and then actually when it comes down to the nails, they’re prepared to fight to the end to save their families, to save their honor, to survive.”
Born in Coleraine and raised in Ballycastle, Fairley has appeared in the films “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries,” “Hideous Kinky” and “The Others,” and has had roles in the TV shows “The Bill,” “Holby City,” “Heartbeat” and “Inspector Morse.”
She portrays Lady Catelyn Stark, a wise and stout-hearted woman who puts her husband and five children above all, on “Game of Thrones,” a sexy, gritty drama about several families battling for control of a fictional medieval kingdom.
By the end of the series’ first season, most of the male leads have been killed off, including the hot-headed, drunken King Robert Baratheon, played by Mark Addy, and his right-hand man, Catelyn’s reasonable, honest husband, Lord Ned Stark, played by Sean Bean. Also gone from this world are Viserys Targaryen and Khal Drogo, the ambitious, power-hungry characters played by Harry Lloyd and Jason Momoa respectively. The Season 1 bloodshed paves the way for the men’s widows, siblings and children to try to unseat or defend King Joffrey, the ruthless teen-age son of Robert’s wife, Cersei Lannister, played by Lena Headey. Irish actor Jack Gleeson plays Joffrey.
At the heart of the turmoil, Fairley said she sees the Stark family as a grounding force, demonstrating more integrity and mercy than the crown-mad Lannister, Baratheon and Targaryen clans.
“They’re like a touchstone family,” the actress said of the Starks, whom Catelyn helps lead against Joffrey in the new season. “The head of their house is Ned and he is extremely honorable. He is a very complicated character, as well, but ostensibly he has been raising a family to have incredibly good morals. They care about the people they work with. There is a system of honor of how you treat people. Basically, in that cruel, hard world, you have to treat people with respect and what you give out, you get back. It’s a tough world, as well. You will get punished, so you have to be strong within that. They, as a family, try to maintain those ideals within a very complicated, deceitful world and then once Ned goes, you start to see the survival element [taking over] for the rest of them. … So, there’s a bit of rot setting in there, but even though they are changing constantly and evolving, they aren’t becoming immoral. They’re trying to survive and they think what they are doing within that is right.”
So, do cast members of the show live in fear, wondering if the next script will be the death knell for their characters?
“I think everybody is aware that nobody is safe. Everyone is expendable in this world,” Fairley laughed. “From an actor’s point of view, when you’re off on a job like this, it’s pretty clear. They initially tell you, ‘We’ll sign you for this number of years.’ But, basically, they will tell you this is a character who will be in it for five episodes, then they get their head chopped off or they get thrown off a cliff or run over by a horse. As an actor, if you’ve read the books, you know going in exactly what your trajectory is. But having said that, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the main writers, they may like what you’re doing and decide: ‘Hmmm, we’ll keep you a bit longer. We might change your part.’ They don’t always necessarily stick to the stories in the books.”
Fairley said not knowing definitively where the show might take her is one of her favorite aspects of working on “Game of Thrones.”
“It’s fun and there’s something incredibly brave about a series that kills off main characters instantly,” she noted. “It’s wonderful drama and also it leaves the path open for other characters to come into the fore. Once you kill a main character like Stark, who is good and the moral compass within the piece, there’s nobody there to rein everybody back, and try to argue for reason and goodness, then you open the world up for mayhem and evil, greed and deceit and treachery. It’s incredibly exciting from a drama point of view.
“I think the audiences love it. You love badness in these characters, as well, because it’s all about survival. It’s a cruel world they live and people will do whatever they have to do to survive,” Fairley added.
Shooting on Season 2 of the series has already been completed in Belfast and Croatia and the first new episode is to air on HBO on Sunday. Joining the ensemble for the sophomore season are Stephen Dillane, Carice van Houten and Liam Cunningham.
Asked if it was bittersweet going back to work without so many of her co-stars from Season 1, Fairley confessed: “If somebody leaves, you miss them terribly, but then, of course, it’s a job of work and you have to keep on going.
“Starting Season 2 after the success of Season 1, there’s extra pressure on you,” she said. “It’s like we have the success, so we have to build on it and we have to work even harder. I think that’s what the audience will see when they start watching Season 2. Not only have we got a lot of new characters, which is incredibly exciting, but also, visually, it looks incredible. The pace is wonderful. There’s a lot of humor in there. It just goes at a rate of knots and you’ve got the old characters, as well, and you know exactly what they are up to.
“It’s naughty; it’s dangerous. I just think it’s fabulous,” Fairley said.
The first episode of the second season of “Game of Thrones” will be broadcast on HBO on Sunday at 9 p.m.
