You’ve been warned…spoilers ahead!
The sixth season of Game of Thrones is in full tilt already with one of its biggest deaths so far. Noah Taylor, who played Locke, met his untimely death at the hands of a Hodor. Vulture managed to speak to the 44-year-old actor after his exit from the HBO series.
Taylor shared, “I just assumed I was going to die this season, so it wasn’t a big shock or disappointment to me. And I was fine with it. I kind of expected Locke to have some sort of demise, partly because of what he did to Jaime Lannister [chopping off his hand], and in my imagination, I thought Jaime would have something to do with it, possibly, to have a sort of karmic revenge at some point. But nobody knows. Nobody in the cast really knows until the scripts come out, and they are sort of guarded about that.”
However, there was a big clue for English-born star that indicated his demise was near. He said, “But this scene involved prosthetics, and those were done months before, and that was when I first knew I was going to die, actually. They send you to the prosthetics factory to get fitted for a broken spinal cord, and that’s always a good indication that something bad is going to happen to you. There’s not much coming back from that, so I knew something was afoot. This was before I got the script, so that was my tipoff.”
Taylor also talked about the prosthetics process and how it’s kind of a painful and awkward moment when they are fitting you for a broken spinal cord.
“It’s just a lot of time being covered in latex, with your neck bent to one side, so it’s not particularly comfortable. You just have to not move and you get a stiff neck. The whole show, there’s a lot of discomfort. People hitting you over the head with various things. There’s a lot of room for injury in that show, but they have really excellent stunt people and you rehearse all that stuff, so it’s very rare that anything happens, but you get clomped every now and again, you get in the mud, you get prosthetics, things like that,” he explained. “But it’s all part of the job. You get used to that. That’s just how it is. But it’s fun to have a character who gets killed off, versus someone who moves away. Nice and final. And it’s a good, grisly, dramatic death. It’s always good to go out in a spectacular way.”
Go big or go home! Taylor did a bit of both.
Game of Thrones airs Sundays on HBO.
