Game of Thrones season 5: 'There are horrific deaths every year', says actor Liam Cunningham

Can you set the scene for Ser Davos as we join him in Season Five?

For once, the boys are on a bit of an up. Season Four has provided us with finances through the Bank of Braavos, and we finally found ourselves in liquidity. We’ve used the money to get ourselves an army, although a hired one. Stannis is a proven battle commander and has used his wily ways to do a severe pincer movement on the Wildlings, save Jon Snow and capture Mance Rayder. So we find Team Dragonstone at the start of Season Five in what is for them a luxurious position - they actually have a bit of power and have routed the ‘enemy,’ in inverted commas. Where we go from there is pretty logical, I think - an attempt on getting Stannis on to the throne now seems like a real possibility, and we start off Season Five on that route. 

What is Davos’s position under Stannis now? Does he have more power? 

Davos would never think of it in terms of victories or of spoils; there’s a job to be done. I think his battle is keeping Stannis on the right track. He’s not a military man, but you can well imagine that as the series progresses he’s going to come up against it, and specifically because of the Red Woman (Melisandre). And, without giving anything away, this comes to a very, very serious and dramatic conclusion. Maybe we shouldn’t use the word conclusion – a dramatic head, later on in the series, which is extraordinary. 

How do Ser Davos and Jon Snow get along – you’d have thought they might have some things in common?

Obviously there is a huge amount of respect, and I think it goes both ways. However, Jon’s responsibilities increase, and he’s in a very difficult position because of his pledge to the Night's Watch. Effectively he’s married to the Wall and that may prove something of a problem. Every character is pulled in several directions. It’s one of the glorious things about the show - loyalties, political expediency, and the desire to keep oneself alive very much influences every decision that’s made by everybody. 

What is it that keeps Davos loyal to Stannis?

It goes right back to his getting his fingers taken off, and the fact that Stannis gave him a life. There is a scene earlier on in the show where Davos says to his son, ‘Look, he took us out of squalor; he gave us a life: you can read.' Davos is a Lord. He’s a decent man, just a decent man in a nest of vipers. He certainly isn’t a coward, because he has no respect for his own life - Stannis said to him, I think in Season Three, ‘You don’t seem to care much about your life,’ and he said, ‘No, not really’. In a sense, he’s the guy we’d all like to be - presented with a choice of selling yourself, or selling your soul and having riches and whatever it may be, he would never even think of it. There’s no bag of money big enough to buy this man, because it’s not in his nature. He has a desire to reward decency: if he’s been treated well, then the mathematics are, what can he do for you in return? I think that’s what loyalty is; there’s no question of him being two-faced or fork-tongued. There’s a magnificent simplicity to him that is incredibly honourable.

Do you think Game of Thrones has relevance to the current political scene?

Yes, that’s one of the things that makes it so great. I mean, some of these stories in this season, you just change the name of the characters to certain politicians that we see around at the minute, and it’s real life. You can see these guys who, I assume, go into politics and business and all these sort of things for the right reasons; they want to get on, they want to make a few quid, and they want to make an impression and leave a legacy. However, when you play the game, what you need to do to stay where you want to be can destroy the very reason why you wanted to do it in the first place. The ‘means to an end’ thing is what destroys men’s souls. 

What has filming been like for you this year?

It’s definitely not as glamorous as doing the publicity once it’s all done! We spend a lot of time in bloody pop-up gazebos and hunched round a Calor gas fire, eating our lunch out of plastic boxes. Shooting’s a little rough because it’s a huge thing and we shoot in rough areas; we shoot in muck and snow. I’m always in Northern Ireland so there’s a bit of rain. It’s not always delightfully warm, but it doesn’t really matter, because the landscape is a huge character in the series.

Several years in to this, are you in any way still taken aback by some locations or scenes? 

Oh, yeah. I mean one of the scenes that is going to be in this year’s show, without giving any of the plot away, they had a team of painters painting the landscape for a month. Hundreds of metres of hill, painting it because they wanted snow - they had the terrain but they didn’t have the snow. They have these things like peat moss, these rectangular/square plastic things that look like snow. I’ve never seen snow like it. You can actually make snowballs out of it; it’s ridiculous, and they’re just throwing this thing around for the texture. I came out one day, and the entire thing’s painted, and I went, ‘It looks like it’s been snowing here.’ They said, ‘We’ve been out for a month doing this’. I went, ‘What?’ Fellows were up painting the hill, and you’re just kind of going, ‘Christ, man.’

Does that sort of level of attention to detail help performance? 

It’s huge. You will see on a number of computer generated movies, where people walk into a place that has a green cyclorama, into a studio, to film. There’s nothing there. Obviously you use your imagination and it’s fine for the first day, but on week three when you’re looking at a green screen over a long period of time, your imagination doesn’t get fed. Whereas if you’ve got the toys around you - and in our case, they’re very, very expensive toys, these incredible costumes, incredible props, extraordinary sets - it just makes it so much easier to convince yourself that you’re there. When that happens, you feel the world a little bit more, and it makes your performance a little bit easier.

Which types of scene do you enjoy the most?

The dressing up and running around is the kind of stuff that gives texture and tone to the episode, but it’s really for the director. Actors in those scenes are, in the very best sense, marionettes, chess pieces being moved around, and that’s fine - I love the technical aspect of making this, and I love seeing the scope of it. However, when you’ve got someone of the quality of Stephen Dillane, or for example, in Season Four when you’ve got Mark Gatiss, who I’ve always been a huge fan of, to be in a scene where the entire future of team Dragonstone and Stannis is in the room, that’s where brilliant writing comes in. That’s the joy for me, to be playing that, and knowing you don’t have to drag performances out of other people, or yourself, because the people in the room are just amazing.

It’s an intense, serious show to watch. Is it funny on set sometimes?

It’s one of the quietest sets I’ve ever worked on. People are there with a ‘let’s do it’ mind-set. But, you can’t be serious like that all the time because you get really boring, and I do have fun with Carice (Van Houten, who plays Melisandre). She is my foil. I do enjoy messing with that woman, I must say. She’s great fun; we’ve known each other years. We did a movie together before we started this, and we were lovers in that, so things have changed! 

Could we see that rekindled in Davos and Melisandre?

It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. If the Red Woman can turn around when Stannis wants to kill me, and the Red Woman saved my life, then it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that George )RR Martin) could go, ‘Let’s get these two together. Have a little red baby.’ That would be amusing. 

When a character is killed off, do the cast do a special send off? 

Listen, there are deaths every year, so I’m not giving anything away saying it’s horrific when you’ve spent time with people, and then they’re gone. We do have drinks: it’s Ireland, I think it’s the law! It’s horrible when people go, and it sort of feels wrong. A little bit has been stolen from you, because we’re part of this weird thing that we all find ourselves in. 

Game of Thrones Season 5 airs on HBO Defined every Monday at 6:30 am IST with a repeat telecast on the same day at 10pm.