Game of Thrones’ Ser Barristan actor was shocked about his early exit: ‘I thought I was going to have more to do’

Game of Thrones actor Ian McElhinney, who played the valiant Ser Barristan Selmy, was not expecting his run on the show to end so quickly.

HBO’s Game of Thrones had always been an unpredictable show, even for its actors. But for Ian McElhinney, who played the valiant Ser Barristan Selmy, his exit from the series was still very shocking.

Ian McElhinney played the brave and righteous Ser Barristan Selmy on Game of Thrones.

Ser Barristan the Bold breathed his last in the fifth season of the show. He was killed during a battle with a gang of rebels from Mereen, fighting arm in arm with the Unsullied. However, this is not the end that was written for Ser Barristan in the books.

Ian told EW in 2015 that he had read the book and so his sudden wrap up came as a shock. “It proves you should probably not read the books. I’ve read the books. So I thought this season I was going to have more to do, and I was really looking forward to that. And then I got my dates from my agent and I thought, ‘That doesn’t tally.’ Because there was no way if they were sticking to the books that I should be in for that number of weeks. It seemed to me they must be writing me out,” he said.

Ian said he even talked to showrunners DB Weiss and David Benioff about it. “So I had a word with the line producer and said, “Can you corroborate that they’re writing me out?” Then the [showrunners] rang me and told me, ‘Your time is up in this series.’ So perhaps I took them by surprise that I knew,” he said. The actor added that he was disappointed with how his character was dealt with.

“I’m disappointed. But I think you have to accept—as I have accepted—that the demands of TV are different than the demand of book writing. With TV there’s a pressure to create a number of high points. One of the big things about this series—it’s true in the books and even more true in the series—is the surprise element, the shocks. They’ve got to keep that up because people expect that. You can’t predict anything but what you can predict is that there will be surprises,” he had said.

Game of Thrones ended in the summer of 2019 to great disappointment among fans with how the stories of their favourite characters were tied up. Their only hope are the final two books in A Song of Ice and Fire series by George RR Martin, which he has finally got back to writing.

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