John Bradley on Game of Thrones: “It was my first audition out of Drama School”

Samwell Tarly on Game of Thrones is one of the few most adorable characters, and in a world full of devious and evil people scheming to win the Iron Throne, Sam comes as a lovable distraction who doesn’t want a lot from life. Actor John Bradley has portrayed Sam really well so far, and hopefully his character will survive what horrors are coming on Game of Thrones in seasons 7 and 8. During a long podcast, John talked about Game of Thrones and Sam, and how he got the part. Here are some excerpts from the podcast:

Talking about Sam’s physical appearance and how it makes the character relatable, John said,“I think you have to make the extremity of the world, and just the fact that this is an environment where you can die at any second, from any number of sources. Anything can try and kill you, so what you get with Sam, is you get somebody in there who is reflective of how you’d manage. Because if you don’t have people like Sam if you get only people like Jon Snow or The Mountain, or people with this incredible physical prowess that can deal with all that stuff…if everybody in the world can deal with it, then it’s not as much of a threat as it should be.”

He continued, saying how he auditioned for the show:“It was my first audition out of Drama School, it was the first thing I went up for, I didn’t have any kind of frame of reference at all. I had heard of the books, but I hadn’t read them.”

Here are some of the highlights of the podcast:

• 36:00 – Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister and Gwendoline Christie as Brienne.
• 36:45 – Nina Gold, the casting director for Game of Thrones.
• 40:00 – Bradley talks about the show expanding year over year and how each season is its own 10-hour film.
• 42:00 – Any character, no matter how popular they are, can die on the show at any moment.
• 60:00 – John Bradley’s first scene with Stephen Dillane (Stannis).
• 60:03 – George R.R. Martin’s writing, and how the show and books are their own entity.
• 60:15 – Maisie Williams’ master of social media.
• 60:20 – How Game of Thrones has set each actor up for a future in television and film, after the show has ended.

The aforementioned points of reference will help you skip through the podcast, but if you’ve got enough time, it is pretty interesting to listen to the entire thing. You can listen to it here.