Why Julian Glover’s Grand Maester Pycelle Left Game Of Thrones

Julian Glover is probably one of the only actors who asked to be killed off of “Game of Thrones.” Glover admitted as much at Montreal Comic Con in 2018 (per ScreenHub), explaining that he wanted his Grand Maester Pycelle to bite the bullet before his season 6 demise. A vital character in George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice And Fire” series, on screen Pycelle became one of the most extraneous background players as the HBO adaptation wore on.

“I didn’t want to do (season 6) because I realized I was being completely dismissed as a character,” Glover told IGN ahead of the fantasy series’ ending. Speaking of Lena Headey’s character, he recalled: “Cersei ticked me off all the time, and I never had any comeback. So that wasn’t any fun to play.” The actor made a similar statement at the aforementioned pop culture convention, reportedly explaining that his character in the TV show never really went anywhere and he became bored of playing a tired, elderly man who spent most of his time fuming at Cersei.

Glover is right that Pycelle became a wallflower in the overcrowded series’ massive cast of characters, but the Maester plays a pivotal role in both Martin’s version of the story and David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ ambitious, messy TV show. Pycelle was, after all, one of the men who whispered in the ear of the Mad King Aerys, leading to the Sacking of King’s Landing. As a master of poisons, he was also behind some of the series’ biggest and most merciless power shifts. Yet due to his age, Pycelle was often portrayed in the TV series as an old guard opposite younger schemers like Aidan Gillan’s Littlefinger and Conleth Hill’s Lord Varys. By season 6, it was clear that it was time for Pycelle to go.

The veteran performer told IGN that he spoke to the showrunners ahead of season 6, saying, “Look, I don’t want to do this anymore, it’s not interesting to go on doing this and go on doing this, and what’s going to happen to him?” In response, they pitched him a “wonderful scene.” Glover, as was typical for the show’s cast, wasn’t privy to the details of the scene ahead of time, but he ended up loving the result. The actor has called it a “damn good scene,” telling the outlet that it “is exactly the sort of way I wanted to go out.” In the show’s season 6 finalePycelle gets lured to what Glover calls “this awful cell-like, prison-like atmosphere,” where he gets stabbed to death by the creepy kid spies operating under Qyburn’s (Anton Lesser) command.

“The actual death scene itself was so cunningly contrived,” Glover told interviewers, noting the “wonderful irony” that the oldest character on the show was killed off by a bunch of kids. In Martin’s “A Dance With Dragons,” it’s Varys who kills Pycelle in support of the Lannisters, and his death scene is brutal in a different way. One of the last things his ally Kevan (Ian Gelder in the TV show) sees before he’s also killed is Pycelle’s corpse, leaking blood onto a book he was reading before death while “all around his candle were bits of bone and brain, islands in a lake of melted wax.” It’s a memorable, gory death scene in a franchise full of them.

That image is haunting and gnarly, but the scene Glover shot was more action-packed. The actor noted that it had to be shot in one take due to all the fake blood, and he had to nail a stunt fall after the kid attackers overwhelmed Pycelle. “And I did get it in one and then that was very satisfactory, and I was very happy to say goodbye to people on that particular moment,” he told IGN. Glover was smart to ask for an out, even if his character was set to die at some point anyway. The final season of “Game of Thrones” was poorly receivedwhile he went on to appear in acclaimed shows and films like “Inside No. 9,” “The Crown,” and Todd Field’s “Tár.”