Give it up for the “old” guys. I can’t think of too many things that look nicer on a guy than a classic Pea Coat.
I’ve been at a Trek Con attended by SirPatStew (I asked him a question and he called me “my dear” and I MELTED), but I’m still sad I never got to hang with these two while they were in town shooting all the X movies.
Also, can we call this a Landwich or do there need to be two of him for that?
Rory McCann (Sandor “The Hound” Clegane in Game of Thrones) as a young lad in Monarch of the Glen.
I’m posting this in honor of The Hound’s epic exit the other night during “Blackwater” (best illustrated by the inimitable Bohemea).
I’ve been enjoying a lot of the Game of Thrones recaps this season, but none so much as Andy Greenwald’s over at Grantland. (Made especially more enjoyable because he’s a newbie to the books — a non-Bookwalker!)
Sandor Clegane wears his brutal past on his face like a mask, a terrible Tyson tattoo of violence and regret. The Hound began the hour playing the part of the dutiful soldier, a doubt-free killing machine, less interested in defending the honor of his fraudulent king or the walls of his fetid city than in doling out the ferocious punishment that is his stock-in-trade. As Stannis — himself a bad actor, pursuing the crown out of childish spite and witchy infatuation — storms the walls, Clegane’s giant sword splits Baratheon bannermen like so much kindling before a long winter. Yet it’s the Hound himself who breaks. “Look at me,” he fumes to Sansa through wine-stained lips after retreating from the battlefield. “Stannis is a killer. The Lannisters are killers. Your father was a killer. Your brother is a killer. Your sons will be killers someday. The world was built by killers. So you’d better get used to looking at them.”
Of all the impressive feats accomplished by this remarkable episode, this may have been the greatest of them all, revealing the palpable sadness at the root of the Hound’s sadism. Despite his burned and battered visage, he’s no monster, merely a man sickened by all the hypocritical, monstrous things he’s seen other, supposedly better men do to one another. There are no great heroes in Westeros, only murderers and survivors. So what good are Bronn’s “beautiful women and brown ale”? There are plenty of beautiful women in the ground and the brown ale is only temporary relief — soon it will be flowing into Tyrion’s beloved cisterns or choked up into a floating bucket of sick. With the water on fire and his life on the line, Sandor Clegane used his one good eye to take a clear-eyed look at the real cost of other people’s games and did the most reasonable thing of all: He walked away.
The Hound is one of my favorite characters because he’s one of the strongest voices George R.R. Martin wields in the over-arching conversation about honor in the books — a conversation that obviously also includes Ned Stark (have honor? get killed for it), Jaime Lannister (define your own honor? get hated for it), and Barristan Selmy (have ALL THE HONOR AND ARE A BADASS BECAUSE OF IT).
(I’m not including all my ladies in this conversation — Arya, Sansa, Cersei, Dany, Asha, Catelyn, Brienne, etc etc etc etc could go on because all of GRRM’s ladies are awesome — because there’s an entirely different conversation they’re having about strength, which will be worth having in the future.)
The Hound — terrible facial scar to the contrary — is not Omar Little. I don’t know if the Hound has a code. He’s got a breaking point, for sure (flames in his face, mostly) — and yes, he told Joffrey to fuck himself. But WHO WOULDN’T EVEN IF IT MEANT TREASON. (Willa Paskin has written my favorite article so far this season about Joffrey’s carthartic villainy!)
Despite his attendance on Sansa (and also all the AWESOMENESS THAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT SEASON), The Hound doesn’t care about killing innocent things. Not yet, anyway.
P.S. OBVIOUSLY ALSO I wanted to post this because Rory McCann can GET IT.
We toasted his 90th birthday with rum and cokes, because that’s how my gramps and I roll.
So, this happened.
YES. <3
I have gotten high with one of these people (one of my best anecdotes, but I have to tell it to you in person), and the other one is coming to town this weekend, and suddenly I want to smoke him up more than anyone can possibly imagine.
As someone who still enjoys telling the story of quitting a particularly excruciating assistant job that had devolved into me picking up chihuahua poops (when I’d been hired as a BLOGGER), I love this video beyond words. Whoever he is, Joey indeed quits like a boss.
(Source: dlisted.com)
Drive
(via DOWNTON ABBEY SPECIAL: Brendan Coyle, who plays Mr Bates, is available | Mail Online)
OK ladies, listen up: Downton Abbey’s unlikely crush object John Bates is not married.
I repeat, not married. Well, actually that isn’t quite true. Without giving away too much of the plot as the drama returns tomorrow night, Mr Bates, the gentleman’s valet who set the girly pulse of a nation racing, is married. But Brendan Coyle, the Bafta-nominated actor who plays him, isn’t.
That’s right, he’s 47 and single which is not, he says in his oh-so-dreamy Irish burr, ‘a status I want to take to my grave’. Crikey, so we can believe in miracles! At least, those of us who spend our Sunday evenings swooning over Julian Fellowes’ brilliantly crafted romantic hero can. And now, here he is, sitting with me having lunch.
‘The right person, time and place just hasn’t happened – yet,’ he says. ‘It’s something I want. Through my 30s into my 40s, I’ve gone from one long-term relationship to another, so I’ve spent the last few years taking stock. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing, but only now am I truly ready for a relationship.’
It’s impossible to sit with this man for any length of time and not fall under his spell. The thing is, in the flesh Brendan is, well… he’s Mr Bates – stoical but broodingly passionate and very sexy. Julian Fellowes wrote the character for Brendan after he saw him in the 2004 BBC series North And South because, he has said, he knew ‘he had the capacity to suggest a character’s bitterness and painful past without doing too much to indicate it’.
PSA
On September 12, 1993, New Westminster-born actor Raymond Burr died. He was best known for his starring roles in Perry Mason and Ironside. He also appeared in Dennis Hopper’s 1980 film Out of the Blue, which was set in Vancouver’s punk scene.
(Also born in New West and not to be fucked with, my gramps.)
Learn to dance with James Brown, 1978. (gifs)
Whoa. Whoa. Making it my mission to master all of these.
Michael Caine in Billion Dollar Brain (1967, dir. Ken Russell)
The dark side of fame:
“A long time ago I interviewed Michael Caine. He came to America to make a movie called Hurry Sundown, after having become a success in Alfie and The Ipcress File. And I said, ‘What does it feel like to be a movie star? And he said, ‘You can’t go into a dirty bookstore anymore.’
He said, ‘I tried it. In England we don’t have the kind of pornography you have over here, but I’d heard about the stores in Times Square. And so I looked in through the window of one of them; I was curious. With my trained actor’s eye, I quickly realized that there was no eye contact in a porno store. Everybody looks as tunnel vision, nobody looks at anybody else, and I realized this is a way… An actor would notice this. And I congratulated myself, I said Michael, you can walk right in there because nobody will look at you, so I walked right in.
‘Unfortunately, there was a gent on an elevated stool with a microphone whose job it was to say, ‘Okay gents, this isn’t the library, make your purchases.’ And he got on his microphone and said, ‘Look who we have in the rubber wear section - Michael Caine!’”
-Roger Ebert, Fresh Air, orig. airdate March 21, 1996
