The blessed son returneth! Gendry, the hunkiest armorer in all of Westeros, made his way back from obscurity and right into King’s Landing, where he’d apparently been hiding ‘all this time’.
Oh, how we’ve missed you.
The last living descendent of Robert Baratheon was last seen rowing away in the Season 3 finale, and pretty much everyone had made a ‘still rowing’ joke at one point or another – including actor Joe Dempsie.
Still rowin’…#GoT
— Joe Dempsie (@joedempsie) June 18, 2014
But jokes aside, it turns out that even Dempsie had no idea when or even if he’d be returning to Game of Thrones.
Speaking to Making Game of Thrones, he said:
“At the end of Season 3, I was told Gendry was going to disappear for a while, but be revisited at some point. They [David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, series creators] didn’t put a timeframe on it, but I think they wanted to wait until enough time had passed that people might actually have started to forget about Gendry. But the show is bigger than any one character, so you have to be realistic. There could’ve been a point over the intervening years where Dan and Dave went, “You know, we haven’t got the time or space to address this.” So I’ve been as in the dark as anyone else about whether Gendry would be returning and when.
“My mum goes, “You should email David Benioff just to see…” I was like “Mum I don’t think an email is going to make them go, ‘Oh shit, Gendry.’ So. It’s great to know people outside of my mum were interested. You can’t possibly underestimate how obsessed fans of the show are. Any stone you leave unturned is going to become more and more conspicuous the longer it goes on. I became the sole focus of conspiracy theories and general questions. It’s been a lot of fun.”
You know what else sounds fun? Playing around with that giant war hammer this season, which Dempsie says he prepared for by swinging a sledgehammer around in his garden like a loon.
“I mean, it’s a good way to start on a job when they go, “You’re going to have this fucking badass weapon this time around.” I was told I’d get the hammer when I got on set and was told, “Go get yourself a sledgehammer and just sort of practice with it in the garden…” I thought alright, cool. It’s a very good thing no one can see into my garden otherwise I would have looked like a psychopath. But I was practicing with a sledgehammer for about six to eight weeks before we started filming, just to get used to the weight of it all. When it comes to fight sequences you can’t use the heavy hammer anyway because you’ll hit the stuntman in the head. We’ve got these foam versions. I got a bit excited; you stop apologising after a few takes. You get used to it. The next time it’s a different stuntman you’re hitting.”
Dempsie isn’t much of a tweeter, but this one after last night’s big reveal is 11/10.
🚣 ashore. #Hallelujah @GameOfThrones
— Joe Dempsie (@joedempsie) August 14, 2017
Have a read of the full interview here.
