There are actors you turn to when you’re looking for someone to save the world, and those who can make audiences swoon with just one careless smile. Then there are the men who are at war with themselves – and no one does that quite as well as Richard Dormer.
From the garrulous, troubled Terri Hooley in sleeper hit Good Vibrations to murderous sheriff Dan Anderssen in Fortitude and Game of Thrones’ much-resurrected warrior Beric Dondarrion, Dormer specialises in tormented souls.
“It’s true!” he laughs when I point this out over lunch. “Dan is destroyed, Terri had problems, and every time Beric dies he loses a part of himself so he’s constantly mourning the human he used to be …”
His latest role only cements this reputation. Gabriel Markham, the lead detective in tricky new BBC drama Rellik [killer, backwards] is both a dogged cop and the survivor of an acid attack. He’s a man whose damaged exterior is matched by a riven interior.
Dormer admits the part was physically and mentally gruelling. The prosthetic makeup he wears over much of his face and neck took two hours to put on. “You overheat wearing it, and you can always feel it. It’s pretty grim.” And the timeline of the narrative, which plays out entirely in reverse, was equally challenging.
“Because the story goes backwards you’re aiming towards the person you were before this began rather the one you will be, which is a bit of a head fuck. It really gets under your skin.”
Filming Game of Thrones is arduous in a different way. “The episode Beyond the Wall took five months … it just went on and on. The fight sequence took five weeks to film and lasts five minutes. Just climbing on the dragon took maybe a month – and on screen it’s an eye-blink.” If the cast and crew weren’t so lovely, he says, it would be awful work, because “it’s not nice being soaking wet and very hot and yet very cold at the same time and trudging up and down the most beautiful glaciers in the world – but not even being able to look because you feel so tired.”
His downtime was spent playing world domination game Risk with his co-stars. “There were a lot of arguments, mainly because Iain Glen [Jorah Mormont] is so competitive. He would just sit there going ‘Noooo why? Why are you all attacking me?’.” So who was the best at it? He doesn’t hesitate: “Kit Harington [Jon Snow].”
But his biggest issue was trying not to set fire to stunt men while filming. “Because Beric only has one eye, I’d be temporarily blind and swinging the flaming sword – which is real, not CGI … every time I hit them they’d go whumpf and guys would charge in with extinguishers.” A small price to pay for wielding Game of Thrones’ most memorable weapon: ““Let’s face it, I have the coolest weapon on the show. It’s better than a lightsaber …”
The Star Wars reference is not accidental. When he was cast in Game of Thrones, director Alex Graves drew comparisons with Alec Guinness and Beric, who has come back from the dead six times, certainly has more than a touch of the mystical sage about him. Dormer describes him as Obi-Wan Kenobi after a night on the tiles: “He carries his burden very well and is lightly philosophical about it.”
Raised in Lisburn just outside Belfast, Dormer won a scholarship to Rada but admits his experience was mixed at best. “While Rada is an amazing place there’s something unnatural about it,” he says. “I didn’t really trust it. I remember walking into a received pronunciation class and they were all going ‘How Now Brown Cow’ and I said ‘Do you huv a spur churr?’ Everyone burst out laughing, and the teacher said, ‘That’s how not to do it’.”
Coming from Northern Ireland led to an identity crisis of sorts: he speaks of feeling like a second-class citizen who didn’t know where he was from. “I grew up with the idea that someone might hate you if they knew what religion you were; being afraid to open my mouth because my accent might make people think something about me. Or even if they didn’t, would they understand me?”
He dealt with it by refusing to take certain roles. “There was that sense that as soon as a Northern Irish person opens their mouth you go ‘ah terrorist’ so I refused to do TV and film. Instead, I did theatre for 20 years.”
The switch to screen came at 40, when he acquired a new agent who gave him confidence that he could make it. He stopped doing theatre for a year and did loads of auditions. But didn’t get anywhere. “I was 40 thinking ‘This is ridiculous – my career is over before it even started’.” And then Good Vibrations turned up, a script good enough to make him to break his own rule about Troubles-set films. He broke it again for the propulsive 71. He hasn’t stopped working since.
Having come to his screen career late, is there any role he’d love to play? His answer? Star Trek, no question.
“It’s all about friendship and compassion,” he says. “Gene Roddenberry is one of the greatest guys who ever lived because he gave us hope that the future might be bright and we could accept one another for whoever we were, even if we were alien. That’s an amazing message, don’t you think?”
Rellik starts on BBC1 tonight at 9pm.
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