Movies & TV / News

Alfie Allen Thinks Reaction to Final Season of Game of Thrones Is Due to Separation Anxiety, Angered by Fans Trolling Camera Operators

August 21, 2019 | Posted by Jeffrey Harris
Alfie Allen Game of Thrones - The Spoils of War Theon Alfie Allen

Deadline.com recently interviewed former Game of Thrones star Alfie Allen, who portrayed Theon Greyjoy for every season of the hit HBO series, and he discussed the negative reaction to the show’s final season. Below are some highlights.

Allen on playing Theon: “It helps to be able to empathize with him. You need to approach everything with a positive outlook. Everything you do. If it doesn’t turn out to be a positive character, then it does make you question, and there were times when it didn’t feel like things made sense. I was pouring my all into this character, and I would feel it at times, when I would enter rooms and people would give me a certain look. It was like I was wearing a really bad outfit or something. That was testing, at times, without a shadow of a doubt. David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] were taking me on a journey, where at times I had to question, why is this relevant? There was a definite thread the character had within Thrones where he held a position in the zeitgeist-ness of the show, and I was having to deal with that too, online. In retrospect, I think David and Dan believed in what I could do, even though it took me a while to realize that.”

“Even up to the point of getting an Emmy nomination, this character did make me get inside my own head a lot, and there were dark, dark moments. To have fans give the character a pat on the back after all of it, and end it on a note of positivity for Theon, that feels nice.”

Alfie Allen on if the reaction to the final season is due to separation anxiety: “Too right. I think we’ve seen it before, in other shows that have been massive, where people didn’t agree with how things ended. Where people are like, “This is not really feeding what I need anymore.” So inevitably, that was going to happen. David and Dan were under huge pressure to finish this series off and do it in the right way. In my opinion, HBO set out to have a fantasy show—in inverted commas—that was steeped in familiar relationships, and those things were always at the core of it. I think that’s what those last few episodes were. It rounded up all those relationships, and of course people will be unhappy to leave them.”

“What pisses me off, though, is when you see people like the camera operators, who are the best in the world—people behind the scenes who break their backs for this show—who are then getting trolled online by people. I can’t even delve into that world too much, for my own sanity. But to read all that stuff… People laying into the DPs. It blows my mind.”

Allen on how the show changed in scale with Season 3: “I think Season 3 is where it really kicked off, with the Red Wedding. Season 1, obviously, had a major character get killed off, but Season 3 was where it really started to feel big. It always felt like each season was getting bigger and bigger. But the Red Wedding was a lot for people to handle. I even remember speaking to Richard Madden, and being really shocked when he said, “Yeah, I die.” He felt like such a mainstay, you know? I had only read the books up until about two and a half. When Theon gets locked in the dungeons, I stopped reading. I didn’t know about the Reek name, but I knew torture was coming. So we were shocked when Richard announced he was going to be killed. But he’s come out and said he was quite happy that he was killed off early.”