Game of Thrones season 6 episode 10: Lancel Lannister actor Eugene Simon on the finale's death toll and crawling around in bat sh*t for his final scene

We caught up with the spurned Lannister to discuss being vaporised by wildfire

*This interview contains spoilers for Game of Thrones season's 6 final episode, 'The Winds of Winter'*

CH: Hey man, you just got back to the UK right?

ES: Yeah, I got in from Australia yesterday; my head is still definitely spinning.

After a long haul flight like that you must have turned on your phone and been met with floods of comments.

It’s been a pretty active few hours! There’s been some nice feedback.

How did you find out your character was going to die, did you get the courtesy call?

Yes, I did, I got a call from Dan [Weiss] and David [Benioff, the showrunners] as soon as the scripts came through and they were very sweet to me, they told me I had a scene coming up in the season finale which Lancel is at the very centre of and I said ‘sounds wonderful, I look forward to it’. It’s not a case of ‘if’ in this show but ‘when’ and ‘how’, and I I was very happy with the way Lancel went out.

Presumably, a hell of a lot of other cast members got a similar call around the same time. Obviously in your case there’s no doubting your character’s death as he was right in the centre of the wildfire, but are there any people holding out hope that their characters escaped the blast somehow, as their death was implied off-screen?

No, I think everyone who was in that building definitely knows that they’re dead, and that there’s no way to bringing their vaporised ashes back to life.

Lancel Lannister, pre and post Faith Militant (Picture: HBO)

You’ve known about Lancel’s death for a while now, has it been weird having to lie to fans and press about it?

Yeah, but I’ve gotten used to it over the course of the show, you have to keep your mouth shut about a lot of things. It was more difficult to lie about why it was that my hair had been cut off for season 5 and also about Jon Snow being ‘dead’ - I’d known that he was alive since we started filming. It’s part of the job, really, and the way that I did lie was by indulging people’s ideas for what would happen and leading it that way.

In terms of the practicalities of the death scene, where you staring at real, luminous fire or just a tennis ball on a stick?

The fire effect that was in front of me was real pyrotechnics, actually. My face was a foot and a half away from a flammable liquid which was on top of the chemical that looked like wildfire, it was only the actual blast that blows the building to pieces that was made with CGI. So it was very hot, I was covered in fake blood, running all down my back, mud from the ground which was made up almost completely of bat shit coz there was a large bat colony down there, sweat, both fake and my own, and that was my last day on set really. All I did was drag my paralysed body across the ground, so it was a pretty intense last shoot but that’s also a regular day at the office on Game of Thrones.

I guess all that helped you in giving an authentic performance too.

Yeah exactly, it was as real as it could be.

I don’t think it’s every really dealt with - more just presumed off-screen - what do you think made Lancel join the Faith Militant? Was it him repeatedly being used as a pawn by his family?

Well the Lancel who comes back in season 5 is someone who has undergone a huge amount of trauma, and I think one of the parts of that was really being alone in the world in a lot of ways - he had a name that was supposed to instil fear in his enemies and he worked as hard as he could to try to have that energy shine through him, but unfortunately the Lannisters are a very cannibalistic family and he was victim to a lot of their machiavellian habits. I think he was looking for a rebirth so he never had to feel under the thumb again.

Is it weird now that you’ve seen your last episode go out and the Game of Thrones chapter of your life is over?

I guess it is, I don’t feel much at the moment, or if anything just happy - I’ll always look back at it with fond memories, we’ve been amazed by how well the show’s done even though we do give it totally 100%, and I’ve had such good fortune to play a character I really, really enjoyed playing within a show that’s become something of a phenomenon. I just feel humbled and eagerly ready to move on to the next piece of work.

Yeah, what are you doing next?

The reason I came back to London was to work with this little theatre company called the Oval House Theatre which Pierce Brosnan is helping to establish, and then in the mean time on top of that I’ve had, interestingly, a number of offers - it’s been coincidental, I think - on some rather psychologically impaired characters so I’m just trying to finalise those and see what we end up with.

Great, thanks for this and best of luck with those projects.

Thanks mate.