He is the Game of Thrones zealot whose appearance has prompted comparisons with Jeremy Corbyn. Now viewers are about to see a lot more of High Sparrow, the menacing cult leader played by Jonathan Pryce.
The barefooted religious zealot, a dishevelled-looking outsider with soft spoken rhetoric whose Faith Militant order conquers King’s Landing, led to not entirely flattering parallels with the Labour leader when he first appeared in the fantasy drama’s fifth series last year.
The new series, which begins on HBO in the US and on Sky Atlantic in the UK on Sunday, will explore High Sparrow’s roots.
“It was all with good intentions; he had lived a very debauched life, he was very rich, and he woke up one morning and said, ‘This is wrong’ and walked out with bare feet. He’s stayed barefooted ever since,” Pryce told the new issue of Radio Times.
“It’s funny, or perhaps ironic, but if you look on the internet there are images of me and Jeremy Corbyn as a looky-likey. That could be interesting. A faith militant!”
The actor has tended to shy away from comparisons with Corbyn, beyond that they “dress equally as badly”, preferring parallels with the Pope.
“I remember coming to the character early on and it was the same time, more or less, as Pope Francis had been elected,” said Pryce.
“There was Pope Francis doing everything that High Sparrow had been doing, apart from the bare feet: talking to the poor, administering to the poor, exactly what High Sparrow was doing. The intentions are good.
“Then the fundamentalist side of the faith begins to take over. The punishments, the brutality, his army growing. And finally this desire to take over the known world.”
Pryce added: “I’ve played a lot of bad guys, and I’ve played a lot of very good guys — they all have the same self-belief, up to a point. I’ve never played anyone who is a sadist, who knows he’s doing bad.
“Most of the people I’ve played just don’t have an awareness. Because even when people say to me, ‘Oh God, I hate High Sparrow, he’s really awful,’ I respond with, ‘Why do you think he’s bad? He’s sorting out these other bad people — they’re bad, and he’s dealing with them.’
“Ultimately it will become extreme and wrong, but I don’t think he’s got there yet.”
Elsewhere in Radio Times, Iwan Rheon, who plays Game of Thrones sociopath Ramsay Bolton, said he pitched his character “somewhere between the Joker from The Dark Knight and Dennis the Menace, with a little bit of Liam Gallagher in there”.
Owen Teale, who plays Ser Alliser Thorne, said: “People love the character. They come up to me on the Tube and ask me to abuse them: ‘Could you call me a ‘bah-sted’, I want to record it? Say it with real contempt’.”
