Syrio Forel actor Miltos Yerolemou originally auditioned for Lord Varys on Game of Thrones

Destiny often plays funny tricks on people. It has a strange way of manifesting itself. For example, Joe Dempsie, who played Gendry on Game of Thrones, was originally up for Jon Snow. And we’re thankful he didn’t, because he was great as Gendry, and Kit Harington was perfect as Snow. Miltos Yerolemou, famous for his role Syrio Forel, almost didn’t play his much-beloved character. Talking to Collider in an interview, the actor revealed he was originally in talks for playing Lord Varys.

He revealed, “Yeah. Varys, that was my first read. That was the first thing I read for. It was a great scene. It’s the scene where Ned is imprisoned after being injured by Jaime Lannister. And he is in prison and he goes to him and he says, “Look, just renounce what you said about Cersei and just basically take the black. Your family will be safe. And that’s the way to deal with the situation.” It’s almost like a confessional. And it’s such a brilliant scene.”

“I had no idea what I was reading — I hadn’t read the books, and it literally was just that scene. But it was so brilliantly written… I don’t think I’m being too disrespectful to other jobs that I’ve been for. But, it’s not often you get really good scenes to read in your castings. And when you get a really good scene like that, that is so well-written, you go, wow. You really want to do this job, because if this is the standard of the scripts…”

“So it was really good, and they really liked my reading, but they just didn’t think I was right. But they saw something in me. I was lucky [casting director] Nina Gold and me go back a long way, so she knew who I was when she gave me that thing to read. But I think once she saw it, or once the producers saw my casting for Lord Varys, they were like, “Oh, hang on a minute. Maybe we should get that foreign dude…””

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