Possible Game of Thrones spoilers are below.
When Game of Thrones returns for Season 6 next month, it will welcome another HBO star to its cast, as former Deadwood great Ian McShane will appear. The actor took some heat recently when show fans thought that his publicity quotes gave away spoilers, and in response, McShane offered up a pithily reductive summation of the fantasy epic.
It’s only tits and dragons.
Ian McShane is an ideal person to lay out this kind of assessment without the guilt of looking like a douchebag, since U.K. folks excel at pointed sarcasm. That sentiment is, of course, what a lot of Game of Thrones detractors say about it, with many claiming too many tits even, thus making it the perfect retort to those whose fandom is so strong and pure that they give an actor shit for talking too much.
While he most assuredly doesn’t actually think of Game of Thrones in such simplistic terms, something tells me McShane was far more genuine in the thought he shared right before summing it up.
You say the slightest thing and the Internet goes ape. I was accused of giving the plot away, but I just think get a fucking life.
There’s a hack 1990s stand-up comic joke to be made about tits and dragons being more important to people without lives than anyone else. Sure, certain fans of any media freak out when spoilers go public, but Ian McShane doesn’t appear to be the kind of Game of Thrones fan that knows exactly who and what can and can’t be mentioned when doing press for the show, and he can hardly be blamed for mentioning anything that he wasn’t prepped to avoid talking about, especially from a show that goes to great lengths to hide plot points prior to episode airings. Unless he was told not to say anything. In that case…I still side with McShane, because duh.
In an act exemplary of several of his onscreen characters, Ian McShane stoked the fire even more in explaining how he got the Game of Thrones gig, using possible spoilers to do it. He’d wanted to once again work with Charles Dance and Stephen Dillane, not realizing that their characters had been killed off. And then he told The Telegraph this:
I wasn’t sure whether I could commit, but then they said it would only be for one episode, so I said, ‘So that means I must die at the end of it. Great, I’m in.’
Trying to figure out if a quote or an image is definitely indicative of a character’s death on Game of Thrones should be booming business in Las Vegas, or whatever the gambling capital is in Game of Thrones’ Known World. We’ll certainly find out by the end of McShane’s episode, which will happen at some point during Season 6, which is debuting on HBO on Sunday, April 24.
