Scottish actor Iain Glen delves into his immersive experience in Philippine history and portraying Leonard Wood in the upcoming historical film ‘Quezon’

With his commanding screen presence and knack for portraying layered, conflicted characters, Scottish actor Iain Glen is no stranger to challenging roles, but stepping into the shoes of Leonard Wood—a governor-general of the Philippines who played a role in the country’s independence from the United States—was an entirely different experience.

Best known for his role as Jorah Mormont in the American fantasy drama series Game of Thrones, Glen has built a distinguished career spanning TV, film and theatre with captivating roles in Resident Evil, Downtown Abbey and The Windermere Children. In recent years, he has continued to expand his range with roles in the sci-fi dystopian drama Silo and the supernatural thriller The Rig. 

His latest venture, meanwhile, brings him to the heart of Philippine history. Quezon, directed by Jerrold Tarog, is the third instalment in TBA Studios’ “Bayaniverse” series, following Heneral Luna and Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral. The film chronicles the life of Manuel L Quezon, the Philippines’ first president, with Jericho Rosales in the titular role. 

Becoming Leonard Wood

In the upcoming biopic, Iain Glen steps into the shoes of Leonard Wood, a pivotal figure during Quezon’s era. “I was given good research, and I also did my own. I read biographies of Leonard Wood. I was also given some of his writing,” Glen shares. 

Wood, a medical officer who became the chief of staff of the United States Army, held significant positions such as military governor of Cuba before taking on his role in the Philippines. His tenure as governor-general of the Philippines from 1921 to 1927 was marked by efforts to implement economic reforms and navigate the delicate path toward Philippine independence.

Glen’s approach to embodying Wood was meticulous. He immersed himself in research, delving into biographies and Wood’s personal writings. The availability of archival footage was a revelation for Glen. “There was some invaluable archive footage, which is the holy grail where I can actually see him move,” Glen reflects. This visual aid was instrumental in capturing Wood’s distinctive limp, a result of a shrapnel injury from an American mortar prior to his Philippine assignment.​

Portraying Wood’s character was no easy feat, given his reputation as a strong-willed and often controversial figure. “He was a strong sort of alpha male…and was not really into the shenanigans and the machinations of the political sphere,” Glen explains while commending Quezon director Jerrold Tarog, who carefully balanced Wood’s character in the upcoming film. 

Glen pointed out that Wood’s story is layered. “He was an honest man trying to get a good job done. But what was complex was it was in the context of a colonial power in a country that no longer understandably wanted the Americans to be there. So it was just a very interesting period.” 

Manila experience

Filming in the Philippines offered Iain Glen a refreshing change of pace. “It sounds very, very superficial, but my most memorable experience is lying on a very buoyant ocean at night staring at the sky in Batangas at a beautiful secluded beach. Because that’s why all Brits want to come to the Philippines—it’s such a beautiful climate,” he laughs.

Beyond the scenic views, what struck him most was the warmth and joie de vivre of the Filipino people. “Honestly, I feel it on the set and I feel it on the streets. There’s a joyousness and a kind of open spirit which is just really lovely.”

Culturally, Glen noted the affectionate displays among Filipinos, contrasting them with the more reserved British demeanour. “But often here, I see out of the window of the car lots of couples with arms wrapped around each other. There’s a sensuousness which is really nice as well.”

The bustling streets and unique modes of transportation left a lasting impression on him. “The streets are insane. In the countryside, everyone’s on these tripod motorbikes with a sidecar. I sent a picture to my wife of one bike with a father driving, two children in the middle, and the mother on the back carrying a baby. I even saw another one carrying a cattle,” he says.

Glen’s experience with the Philippine film industry was overwhelmingly positive. “Sometimes in Western film industries, you can have a kind of hierarchy of talent, and there’s just none here. It doesn’t feel like that.” He notes that despite the cultural differences, actors across the world share a common language. “Actors, we kind of communicate in similar ways. The language of a film set is very similar wherever you are.”

Working alongside esteemed actors, including Rosales, was a highlight for Glen. “He is a very fine actor and a lovely, lovely person. He’s carrying the weight of this film, and he’s doing it with great grace and with a lightness of touch.”

Cinematic bridge

Serving as a cinematic bridge, Quezon presents a compelling historical narrative that Iain Glen believes will resonate with audiences worldwide. He remarks, “It’s a fantastic story, the third in Tarrog’s trilogy. He’s a wonderful filmmaker who has brought this rich history to life.” 

Glen views the film as a significant historical record, capturing pivotal events from the mid-19th century onward. “It’s rare to find a film that offers such a comprehensive look at a country’s political landscape,” he notes. “It’s a great, great story with fantastic characters. And it just happens to be pretty much the truth.”

When asked why audiences should see Quezon, Glen emphasises, “Great acting, great visual storytelling, and it’s definitely worth the price of admission. It’s a major blockbuster from the Philippines, which is fantastic.” With its engaging storyline, stellar performances, and historical depth, Quezon is set to make a lasting impression on viewers globally.

As Quezon nears its release, anticipation builds. The film not only gives a glimpse into a pivotal era of Philippine history but also showcases the collaborative spirit of international cinema. For Iain Glen, “participating in this project has been a truly enjoyable experience,” and for audiences, Quezon promises to be a cinematic journey worth undertaking.​

– Interview by Syrah Vivien Inocencio

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“Game of Thrones” veteran Iain Glen‘s latest role is portraying Major General Leonard Wood in “Quezon,” the upcoming historical drama from acclaimed Filipino director Jerrold Tarog.

In an interview with Variety from the film’s set in the Philippines, Glen discussed his preparation for inhabiting the role of Wood, who served as governor-general of the Philippines from 1921-1927 and was instrumental in Manuel L. Quezon’s quest for Philippine independence from the United States. The film is a biopic that chronicles the life of Filipino lawyer and soldier Quezon, who served as president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1935 to 1944.

“Quezon” stars Jericho Rosales in the title role of Quezon and the cast also includes Mon Confiado, Benjamin Alves, Karylle Yuzon, Romnick Sarmenta, J.C. Santos and Cris Villanueva.

“I was sent the script and, hold my hands up, I didn’t know a great deal about Philippine history and I didn’t know much about Major General Leonard Wood either,” Glen says. “I read the script as a script, realizing that it was a kind of historical depiction of that period, and was just very taken by the words, taken by the role.”

The film is part of Tarog’s historical trilogy, following his previous acclaimed works “Goyo: The Boy General” and “Heneral Luna.” Glen reveals that watching these earlier films served as “a crash course in Philippine history” that helped him get ready for his role.

“The production sent me research material, writings of Wood from that period, other writings about that period, as the Philippines reached for their independence,” Glen says. He also studied archive footage and voice recordings of Wood himself, which he found “very useful” in bringing him “very close” to the historical figure.

Glen praises Tarog’s meticulous approach to the material. “Our director is incredibly thorough in everything that he does, and he’s very, very well researched, and he imbues the script with all that material, so it’s kind of there for you,” he says.

Discussing the process of portraying a real historical figure, Glen explains his process: “Once you’ve done your research, once you prepare, once you feel you’ve found the voice for him… then you kind of have to not let go of that, but hope that sits with you, and then just play the scene for what it is.”

Glen highlights the film’s potential impact, saying that it “makes you appreciate the era that you’re in, because you look at the battles that were fought to allow you to live in, in this case, the democracy that is currently being enjoyed in the Philippines.”

The actor was impressed by the production value of “Quezon,” praising “the period, the art direction, the costumes, the sets that we’re shooting in.”

“It really takes you on a wonderful journey,” he adds.

Working with Tarog and a predominantly Filipino cast has been a unique experience for Glen, who describes the director as “an auteur” with “an extensive encyclopedic knowledge of the territory.” He likens Tarog’s directing style to composing music, noting that “everything is orchestrated” with a clear vision of “where the highs and lows are, where the quiet moments, where the emotional thrust must come.”

Glen also praises his Filipino co-stars, calling them “consummately good performers, very talented, very suited to the roles” and says he appreciates the “playfulness on set,” adding, “There’s laughter, there’s fun. And that I really enjoyed.”

– Interview by Naman Ramachandran

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“I THINK they realised f*****g hell we’ve got Compston and they evolved the character from there.”

So says Scottish actor Iain Glen when asked about Fulmer Hamilton – the role played by Martin Compston in season one of Amazon Prime’s The Rig. 

Laughing at his co-star’s remark, the Line of Duty star says he was delighted to return for a second series of the show, which was filmed at FirstStage studios in Leith, not least because there’s plenty left to discover about his character.

Set on an oil rig in the North Sea, the show’s first instalment saw its characters left isolated as they faced supernatural forces. 

“On a personal level, it was great to be back,” Compston told The National. 

“We had such a wonderful time on the first job and it was a lovely big team. Getting that phone call to say we were going again was amazing.”

The second season picks up immediately after the crew escape their rig as a mysterious force beneath the sea awakens a tsunami which devastates the coasts of the UK and northern Europe.

Along with Glen and Compston (both above), series creator David Macpherson talks going bigger in series two, putting Scotland at the heart of production and what the future might hold. 

From ‘Alien to Aliens’

Macpherson said he knew he always wanted a second season and so, much like his cast, was thrilled to see the series renewed.

Audiences were left with a cliffhanger when season one finished, but we now know they’ve been evacuated to the Arctic Circle for a fresh set of challenges. 

“In the first season, there’s that sense of claustrophobia with being in the middle of the ocean and so in series two one of my main aims was to build out the world and make this feel like a global show telling a global story,” the writer explains. 

Specifically, he cites David Attenborough nature documentaries as inspiration, particularly those which explored the deep sea and polar regions. 

Having tackled the former in season one, his attention now moves to the latter in series two. 

“They were massive inspirations. I was a huge nature-doc fan, particularly those David Attenborough classics,” he says. 

“When I was a kid I used to want to be a marine biologist because I watched those. 

“I think the great thing we tried to bring into our show is the strangeness of life on earth is almost more weird than anything you can convey in sci-fi, particularly in the deep ocean. 

“All these strange, undiscovered organisms. We’ve been looking for aliens in the stars but they’re with us all along.

“A big parallel for our show is like the jump from Alien to Aliens. If you’re doing a sequel, you’ve got to do something different and you can’t just redo the same thing. 

Staying in Scotland

For both Glen and Compston, having the show based in Scotland is a bonus on a number of levels. 

The latter points out that the second season was filmed in Edinburgh in the summer, giving him a chance to soak up the Fringe. 

Glen (below) meanwhile said he hadn’t done much filming in Scotland in a number of years.

“I did Glasgow Kiss many, many moons ago and Macbeth at the Tron a long time ago as well,” the Game of Thrones star told The National. 

“There’s this thing as a Scottish actor about can you get out of Scotland, is that something you want to do. 

“At the end of the day, you’re after good writing and you can find that down south, in America, in Scotland, it’s just about opening up possibilities. 

“For about 30 years, I’ve felt I could do more in Scotland. I did a lot in Ireland and that kind of increased the feeling. 

“This was honestly perfect for the reasons that Martin said. For my mum and dad as well. My dad died last year but being as close to them on a daily basis as I have been for 40 years was really special.”

A Scottish story

It’s noteworthy Glen points to Ireland, which has received plenty of praise in recent years for its output. 

We previously told how Peter Mullan was critical of the BBC for its lack of content on the Scottish experience. 

However, Glen (below) is keen to point out that what The Rig does is not only set the story in Scotland, but tell a distinctly Scottish story as well.

It’s one that resonates with Compston in particular, who explains that his dad used to work off-shore and that he has a few friends who remain in the industry. 

“The word we always used was ambition. It’s a show filmed entirely in Scotland, entirely in Edinburgh apart from the odd wide-shot or whatever that goes out to 270 countries in one day,” he says. 

Glen added: “Certainly that first season was a distinctly Scottish story and setting. 

“I’m appreciative of Prime for generating this series and hopefully it’ll give confidence to Scottish funders.”

Likewise, series creator Macpherson felt it was important to showcase Scotland rather than just see it used as sets for big Hollywood blockbusters. 

Plenty of movies have filmed in the country, including The Running Man, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and The Flash. 

“A lot of productions come to Scotland and that’s great. But what I wanted to do is prove our homegrown talent can do just as much.

“A lot of members of our crew started off as trainees and they’ve come back having advanced their careers and reached more senior positions.”

Looking to the future, MacPherson understandably has to remain tight-lipped given the show’s second season has not yet aired. 

He does however add that he’s “very keen” to keep the show going. 

“I’ve got plans for where we would go and I’m very excited for those. It would be to take it to a bigger level. 

“It’s about increasing the scale while keeping it relevant to our world. I want to push it as far as I can go and, if they let us do series three, it’ll be even bigger again.”

Bigger? Definitely. Better? We’ll soon find out. 

The Rig series two will be available on Prime Video from January 2 with season one available to view now.

– Interview by Adam Robertson.

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Iain Glen likes to play a game with his children when they’re out in public. It involves the RADA-trained actor tripping convincingly, a trick which amused his friends when he was younger and still delights Finlay, 29, Mary, 17, and Juliet, 11. “It’ll look like I really hurt myself in a humiliating way,” explains Glen of his antics. “I’ll be in a restaurant and my children will say, ‘Can you go to the toilet and accidentally fall over?’”

It’s the mark of a man who, clearly, doesn’t take himself overly seriously. He chortles: “I enjoy doing it, even though a lot of people might know who I am.”

Hordes undoubtedly do, thanks to Glen’s fame as Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones, HBO’s smash-hit series based on the author George RR Martin’s books. Glen starred in all eight seasons and, five years on, is recognised wherever he goes.

“It’s Thrones, it’s weird,” smiles the effortlessly debonair Scot, who at 63 still boasts strawberry-blond hair, plus sharp cheekbones, and peppers his sentences with vocal impressions and swear words. “Globally it was such a massive hit. I went to film in India recently and it’s scary… you’re stepping off the plane and someone’s wanting a photo.

“We’re in Mumbai or f***ing Iceland. You can be anywhere and get recognised.”

His wife, actress Charlotte Emmerson, 53, with whom he shares his two daughters, is his fame barometer. “She might say, ‘No one’s coming up to you, are they? Are you getting worried?’ Or it’s, ‘You’re very popular today. I can’t move without someone saying something to you!’”

Glen is generally relaxed about the invasiveness of fame – but, like his youngest child Juliet, is naturally shy and values his private space. “She’s got a strange extrovert-introvert personality, which reminds me a little bit of myself when I was younger,” Iain explains. “I would be painfully shy a lot of the time and then suddenly do something ridiculously ‘out there’ for attention.”

Which is why, I suppose, he occasionally hurls his body across the floor of a busy restaurant. Today, Edinburgh-born Glen is speaking to me from his home in Dulwich, south London.

His internet connection is shaky so our conversation, involving one failed Zoom and four separate phone calls, leaves some sentences hanging in mid-air. Nonetheless, he’s amiable and great fun, having enjoyed success on stage and screen – receiving three Laurence Olivier nominations for best actor for Martin Guerre, The Crucible and The Blue Room.

In the headline-grabbing latter, he performed naked cartwheels in front of a half-naked Nicole Kidman. Prior to Game of Thrones, he starred as wealthy media magnate Sir Richard Carlisle in Downton Abbey and also plays a leading role in Amazon Prime supernatural thriller The Rig.

These days, however, he prefers to work less.

“I enjoy doing it as much as I ever did but I don’t have a burning desire to be constantly working,” Glen says.

Yet he was keen to do The Last Front, a new drama about the horror of the First World War, as seen through the eyes of ordinary citizens. “It zones in on the residents of a sleepy Belgian village who are torn apart by a German battalion passing through in the early stage of the war,” explains Glen.

“I thought that they must be similar to the people of Ukraine at the start where they had no idea what was about to hit and then suddenly people’s lives were annihilated or transformed.”

Glen stars as a widowed father and farmer who must overcome personal tragedy to save his neighbours from impending doom.

“The film is set in a pastoral, peaceful, idyllic setting in Belgium but it could have been many places in Europe at that time,” he explains.

It’s not a big-action war epic but the film has enough shocking scenes of violent death. How does he prepare for emotionally tough scenes?

“It’s changed over the years,” he tells me. “I do have an emotional recall, little trigger things that I can go to in my head that will access an emotion quickly for me. They might be things I’ve experienced or which immediately make me feel vulnerable or upset.

“But to play the scene properly, you have to go from ‘life’s normal’ to ‘life’s really not normal’ so you have to let things take you in the moment.”

Glen normally requests directors shoot these scenes up close first to capture the actors’ raw emotions before they take the necessary wide-angled shots.

Explaining this reasoning, he says: “It’s like putting yourself through a little car accident. You pretend to yourself through the course of however many hours of shooting something that you’re looking at something distressing. Emotionally, my brain and heart get very confused and I’m pretty exhausted by the end of the day.”

He’s pleased The Last Front has a cinema release, and has been warmly received in Europe, despite it being an English-speaking film with non-Belgian actors.

“This is a Belgian story, but I hope it doesn’t get in the way of most people’s enjoyment of it. Even when we opened in Belgium, the one question I never got asked was, ‘Why the f***k are you doing this? Why aren’t we watching a Belgian film with Belgian actors?’ I feel very lucky that, in the history of film, English has often been used to find a broader audience.”

Does he worry about certain aspects of filmmaking being viewed as problematic these days? “I think maybe it is…” he begins before but deviating into a slightly long-winded explanation about how blessed he is to be a British actor because of the availability of work.

But he does admit to passing on one project recently, telling me gnomically: “It would have involved another actor who had been through quite a troubled past and I might not have been aware of accusations that had been sort of proved against them in a different era.”

He hesitates. “You have to be so careful of saying, ‘I’m not going to do that’, because of unproven claims, but these have been proven. I quite liked the script but I didn’t think that would be a good move. I didn’t want to be a part of the film for that reason.”

He remains immensely proud of Game of Thrones. His closest friend on set was Emilia Clarke, who played the mercurial queen Daenerys Targaryen.

Some of the cast stay in touch on WhatsApp and a few are mutual Man Utd fans.

“There is the odd party here and there, and we keep an eye out for each other,” he smiles.

We’re speaking several days after the sudden and tragic death of Liam Payne, whose personal struggles with fame and alcohol were well documented. Some of Glen’s Game of Thrones colleagues have spoken of their own struggles in light of their own superstardom – and his advice for young actors is to avoid chasing fame.

“If that’s a goal, then I would really forget about it,” he says. “To sustain a lifetime as an actor, you’ve really got to want to do the acty bit and know that there’s a really high chance that no one will ever know who you are.

“It’s the best business in the world but do not get sucked into some notion of when you’re going to be well-known, how you can become well-known and how fame might feel. I do bump into it quite a lot, even with my kids or other people.

“There is an idea that a loose notion of fame can be superficially attractive, but it won’t keep you going.”

Glen has previously said he struggled academically at school and “was a bit of a rebel” who “scraped his way” into Aberdeen University. “Socially, I don’t like big groups of people and I’m not good at that. I prefer a one-to-one [interaction],” he says.

Even giving interviews and attending events can be tortuous.

“I play the game because I have to. I walk the red carpet for the show I’m doing, and believe in it. I can do all that now. I didn’t used to enjoy it, I thought it was agony.”

Did he have to teach himself how to overcome that then?

“Yeah, a little bit. The truth is that most people think if you’re an actor, you’re probably extroverted and it’s just not true for so many actors. What we like is for people to give us a really lovely set of lines that we can learn and pretend are ours to say.

“I can express love very beautifully but it’s only because someone has written a lovely line for me to express and that’s very different from being me, having to be myself. In fact, it’s almost a polar opposite.

“For a lot of the time when I was younger, I would get tied in knots because it felt like nothing to do with acting to me. I would do a play or film and then, having to speak about it or be yourself, be interviewed about what you’re interested in, what you did – it felt completely alien and irrelevant, without being too earnest.”

It is a blessing that global fame came much later for him then?

“I do, I think it would have been very… I come from a very solid family so I would have found it difficult,” he stutters (his mother, Alison, trained as a physiotherapist, and his father Hamish worked in finance). “I don’t think it would have spun me out in a dangerous way but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it at all. It would have made me more insular and self-conscious and I would have found it very difficult to deal with when I was younger.”

Today, despite his vow to work less, he has umpteen projects on the go.

Right now, he can be seen in the Disney+ original series, The Last Days of the Space Age, about the fallout of NASA’s first space station crashing to Earth in Perth in 1979. And season two of The Rig returns in January.

“I left RADA thinking I was going to have a serious career in theatre and my first jobs were in front of a camera,” he smiles. “I didn’t look back from there.”

Occasionally he has a wobble when he looks at his contemporaries, who have scored phenomenal leading role successes in their 50s and 60s.

“I console myself – well, what was so lucky for me that from the age of 20, I was always busy and doing what I wanted to do,” he adds. And that is the key to success, he suggests.

“Success is making active choices about what you want to do, not being forced to do an advert because you need to earn something. I’ve never had that and I do not take for granted how lucky I was.”

The Last Front is in cinemas now.

– Interview by Kat Hopps.

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The Scottish star says young actors now have to worry about honing their social media profiles as well as their craft.

There is a certain age when a man with a successful career and a happy home life might be thinking about retirement. But not the actor Iain Glen.

“Maybe you’re right and I don’t have to keep going,” he says with a smile and shrug. “I can make active choices to work less, but the only reason I want to work less is because families are commitments. When I work, I enjoy it as much as I ever did.”

Over nearly four decades since he graduated from Rada in 1985, having won the Bancroft gold medal for best actor, Glen, 63, has been a headline stage act, whether turning cartwheels naked in front of the half-nude Nicole Kidman, in David Hare’s The Blue Room, a 1998 sensation, or for winning awards as Shakespeare’s Henry V.

On screen he is world famous as the lovelorn Jorah Mormont, present through all eight seasons of Sky TV’s Game of Thrones, with scores of other notable performances including three leading roles in the Resident Evil blockbuster franchise, and on the small screen, as the villainous Sir Richard Carlisle in Downton Abbey, Throughout, his finely chiselled chin, contrives to make his bad guys almost more compelling than his romantic leads.

The last big newspaper profile homed in on his being a “sex symbol in his sixties” but he bats away that notion away with an embarrassed wave of his hand. “You know, I live with it, I shoulder it. It’s …” he reaches for a word. “… funny. What else can I say?”

Among a handful of projects his latest movie, The Last Front, has been a particular pleasure. Glen revelled in acting as a senior as much among the cast and crew on the real-time set, as he did in the fictional world of his character.

He stars as a widower, Leonard, a loving father, whose life is torn apart in the early days of the First World War when a German platoon with a psychopathic leader marches on to his farm, killing at random. Leonard survives but when the soldiers decide to head towards the local village, his neighbours turn to him for salvation.

Unusually the scenario depicts the war before its descent into mutual annihilation in the trenches. Love stories, class distinctions and deep family allegiances are tangled up in the plot, though resolution arrives in the time-honoured confrontation between good and evil with, as one admiring US reviewer put it, Glen “going full John Wayne” in the finale.

A first feature film by Julien Hayet-Kerknawi, the young Belgian director had the good sense to lean on his star for help and advice. Glen says he “enjoyed being a kind of senior voice on the piece.”

The director had a “strong hold” on what he wanted but would ask his star, “What do you feel about this? What do you think?” or, says the actor, “we would find ourselves in some of the group scenes and I could see that someone needed to step in.

“I had a group of actors around me who I think looked to me for how things might be staged or for affirmation. Without treading on anyone’s toes, I enjoyed that part of it. I felt it mirrored the role that I was playing within the piece. My character Leonard is being asked to be the figurehead of resistance.”

Glen looks almost absurdly relaxed speaking over Zoom, from his “man cave” in the garden of the home in Dulwich, south London, he shares with Charlotte Emmerson, his wife, and their two school age daughters. He has a son Finlay, a theatre director, by his first marriage.

On the wall behind him are two portraits of his wife, and others of Marlon Brando “just because I like the shot”, David Bowie, a musical and theatrical hero, and Samuel Beckett, the Nobel prize-winning writer.

He met Beckett thanks to a role alongside Billie Whitelaw in an Eighties television drama. Soon afterwards he was in France and Whitelaw, Beckett’s muse, invited him to attend a play rehearsal held in a café near the writer’s home in Paris.

“Beckett had no peripheral vision so I was able to sit quite close without disturbing them,” Glen recalls. “He guided Billie through the monologues offering the odd adjective to capture the tenor of any given line. ‘more plaintive Billie’ or ‘softer, elegiac’ that sort of thing.

“After the rehearsal Billie introduced me and he was utterly charming. He was like an owl erect, still, wise with penetrating eyes. He had that wonderfully lined face with all contours leading to those eyes.”

If it feels like a tale from another era, essentially it is. Face-to-face auditions, meetings with famous directors, writers and fellow actors are no longer a given in an age when social media is dominant.

Not so long ago Glen was advised if he wasn’t on Facebook or Instagram he would be in trouble, because the studios “are looking at your followers”. He had never paid much attention until he was working on the first series of the Amazon thriller, The Rig, and his daughter visited the set in Leith, she then posted about it on social media.

Glen went to his co-star Emily Hampshire, the Canadian actor who made her name as Stevie in Schitt’s Creek, and said, “Listen, can you get rid of this for me? I don’t know what my daughter’s done, but she’s put something up in my name.”

Hampshire did the opposite, he recalls.“Emily took a series of pictures of me looking confused about Instagram and then delighted. She did a little montage thing, and made it funny.”

She helped him open an account and “before I knew it, I had hundreds of thousands of followers. I can’t go back now.”

Social media has created other tyrannies for his profession. Over ten years filming Game of Thrones, Glen played opposite Emilia Clarke, who played Daenerys Targaryen, increasingly aware of how hard his younger co-star was working off-set to win her next part.

“At the weekend she was self-taping here, self-taping there,” he said. “My God — when I started out, you simply went to a casting director or met a director. It was by choice, because they couldn’t get the world and his wife into every audition.

“Now, literally, they put the word out. ‘OK, we’re looking for such and such’ and then all the casting rights go to an agency. They might watch 100 self tapes, so people have to self-tape all the time. I feel very lucky I’ve somehow body swerved that, it wasn’t part of my thing.”

His modus operandi ,“call me old fashioned” he says, is to perform as best he can in any role, leaving the producer and director thinking, “I’d quite like to work with him again.” He adds: “That’s the best way to find the work you want to do — not by boosting your half a million followers on Instagram to a million.”

He says he feels awkward talking about himself, and one aspect of showbusiness he never much enjoyed is publicity, still less on the few occasions when he has found himself at the heart of unwanted attention.

In 2001, a couple of years after The Blue Room closed, Hollywood’s golden couple, Kidman and Tom Cruise split. Glen took a flight to Sydney to comfort Kidman, his former co-star and when his own first marriage to Susannah Harker broke down the following year, although all parties deny the incidents are connected, the tabloids were on him.

For years afterwards, this “perfect storm” always came up in interviews, he recalls. “Honestly it was just boring. I feel for other people whose lives are torn apart or exposed [in the press], but I cannot complain. It was very minor.”

Glen, from Edinburgh, is the third of three sons. His mother, Alison, was an occupational therapist by training and a good amateur painter, while Hamish, his father, was manager of the Scottish Investment Trust, and a lover of Scottish country dancing.

He attended Edinburgh Academy through a period in the school’s history now infamous for child abuse. It was Glen who first exposed the scandal with an interview in 2001, describing how he and other boys were sexually assaulted by masters in the showers after rugby.

Only a “minority of masters” were involved, he said, “they got you at an age where you are not quite sure what’s going on.” In the interview he added, there was a continual “air of violence” around the school.

Now he says: “It was an honest appraisal about what happened and what I felt about it. The police got involved to some degree, and then everyone forgot about it.”

When the issue re-emerged in recent years, he remained silent. “I don’t want to speak about it,” he says. “A point comes when time passes so far that you think the battle should have been fought.”

At school, he was a contemporary of the broadcaster Nicky Campbell, one of his great friends. They were “cheeky chaps,” Glen says, fond of pranking a local radio phone-in, by faking ever more bizarre characters, their calls occasionally dominating the show.

The actor adopts the wheedling voice of one of his creations, a fictitious manufacturer who rang in to say he had invented “a glue that’s safe for the children to sniff, they can sniff away to the heart’s content but it’s still got a great adhesive quality.”

Glen went on to the University of Aberdeen where he joined a drama society and something clicked. He says: “The moment I started doing it, it gave me the desire to get to know this strange thing, performing in plays. I had a laser focus immediately.”

Forty years later, he says he is considering a return to the stage in the new year although, typically, he already has projects lined up across many other platforms.

On Apple+ Glen is Pete Nichols, the estranged father of Juliette, the heroine, played by Rebecca Ferguson in Silo, a dystopian science fiction thriller, and he has been praised for his standout performance in The Last Days of the Space Age, a dramatisation of real events for Disney+, when Skylab, Nasa’s first space station, crashed to earth in Western Australia in 1979.

This weekend he is doing a turn at London’s Comic Con exhibition, to promote the second series of the Netflix thriller, The Rig, in which he plays Magnus, the charismatic production manager of an ill-fated North Sea platform.

Will he ever stop? “No, I can’t see myself retiring. Success is nothing to do with publicity, of being known for this or that, or for being a superstar. Success to me has always been about having choice in what I do. And in that I’ve been incredibly lucky.”

The Last Front is in cinemas from Friday November 1

– Interview by Mike Wade

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We talked about the movie The Last Front with director Julien Hayet-Kerknawi and actors Iain Glen, Sasha Luss, and James Downie, as they discussed what makes a film centered in World War I a story which is also filled with hope and connection.

Amidst World War I’s chaos, a grieving father turns hero, leading villagers to safety while evading a relentless enemy driven by vengeance.

Moderated by Mara Webster, In Creative Company.

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Iain Glen is telling a story about a hairy moment while filming The Rig, the much-anticipated sci-fi thriller set on a North Sea oil platform – shot entirely in Scotland and featuring a stellar cast – that has newly arrived on Prime Video.

“There was the odd mishap along the way,” says the Edinburgh-born actor, with wry understatement. “I managed to fall off this crane, which was quite high, having been slightly dismissive of the fact that they wanted to attach safety harnesses to me …”

Glen, 61, known for his roles in Game of Thrones, Titans and the Resident Evil films, plays offshore installation manager Magnus MacMillan in the six-part Amazon Original series set on the fictional Kinloch Bravo rig.

He was shooting a scene with Line of Duty and Mayflies star Martin Compston when the crane incident happened. “I was working with Martin and trying to look after him and I did fall from it,” he recalls, continuing the tale. “Thank God, I was wearing the harness.”

Although, says a slightly sheepish Glen, as they prepared to shoot, he had boldly insisted that a safety harness felt like overkill. “I kept on and on and on about it,” he admits. “They said, ‘Shut up, Iain. Just put it on. You need to. It is higher than you think. The mattress won’t break your fall.’ There were the usual crash mats that the stunt department uses.

“I was very blase. But as I leapt from it, having lost my balance, and dangled, I was very glad that they had managed to persuade me. There was a collective gasp.” I bet Compston, looking on, let loose with a few expletives too? “Oh yeah, definitely,” confirms Glen, laughing.

It is little wonder. As Glen tumbled from the crane, there came a heart-stopping moment when the safety mechanism on the harness took its time to kick in. “It only caught me inches away from hitting the ground,” he says. “I fell quite far before then.”

Talk about dedication to your craft. Nor was Glen alone in this vein. By the time the four-month shoot at FirstStage Studios in Leith, Edinburgh, wrapped, the cast had a few war stories to tell.

Compston has revealed that he was set on fire for a stunt during filming and ended up with “a bit of a tan” when the licking flames got slightly too close for comfort, while Canadian actor Emily Hampshire of Schitt’s Creek fame suffered a black eye from walking into part of the set.

Guilt star Mark Bonnar experienced what he described as “pre-hypothermia” when his body temperature dipped perilously low after being repeatedly drenched with water for a scene.

Their toil is testament to the high-stakes drama that viewers will see unfold on screen. Proceedings open with the oil rig crew preparing to return to the mainland when an eerie fog sweeps in.

Communications go down and all hell breaks loose. Trapped miles offshore, tension and claustrophobia build as a series of unexplained and seemingly supernatural events occur.

While The Rig is binge-worthy entertainment, the show’s creator and writer David Macpherson – who has a masters in environmental studies – has deftly woven themes about climate change and humankind’s thorny relationship with nature into the gripping storyline.

This aspect of the script was something that Glen strongly connected to. “It all feels very pertinent and relevant,” he says. “The issues thematically that this thriller carries are, in a nutshell, what are we doing to the planet?

“Should we be reassessing our relationship with it? How can we nurture it, look after it and not abuse it in the way that we have done, particularly over the last few decades?

“I am proud to be part of something that has a message that is worth hearing without it being didactic or getting bogged down in a way that destroys it from being a powerful and thrilling piece of drama.”

Glen has high praise for Macpherson, who grew up close to Alness on the Cromarty Firth. Macpherson drew inspiration from the “strange things” that his father, who built rigs at nearby Nigg and later worked offshore, would tell him stories about.

“He’s a fantastic writer,” says Glen. “I think he is going to have a stunning career and he deserves it. He is a very gentle soul. Deep thinking. He knew about the rigs because of his father and it was a perfect fit with his interest in geology and the history of the planet.

“David has a great facility with dialogue. Within 15 to 20 minutes of the first episode, you have pretty much got familiar with everyone and without a hint of exposition. That is fine writing.”

It is a Tuesday afternoon in early December, and we are ensconced in an airy meeting room at the Gleneagles Townhouse on St Andrews Square in Edinburgh. The hubbub of the pre-festive bustle and occasional melodic chime of passing trams drifts in through an open window.

Filming The Rig, says Glen, allowed him to spend quality time with his parents who still live in the city. “For it to be shot in Edinburgh which, of course, is where I was born and bred, and be close to my mum and dad who are still here, it was just perfect. I had the happiest time doing it.”

Did he get to see a lot of his folks, then? “I did, yeah,” he says, smiling. “My dad is in a [nursing] home. He lives around the corner from where my mum lives. I used to go see both of them on a daily basis, whenever I could, every weekend.

“That was a treat because it is different when you are there for four months, day in, day out. I would pop in for a meal or bring dad round to mum and vice versa. I cherished it.

“It was also perfect timing. My dad had only recently moved into the nursing home and it was a real difficult wrench for my mother. I was able to bridge that a little bit for them both. It felt very fortuitous that it happened that way. I kind of rediscovered the city as well.”

Glen, who lives in London with his wife and three children, embraced the opportunity to revisit some of his old stomping grounds, even if he did find the Scottish capital to be a markedly different place to that he once knew.

“It has changed,” he says. “There is no street front that feels the same. Everything has evolved. But I got to know it by foot and bicycle. There are fantastic bicycle paths and footpaths all over Edinburgh. When I had time off, I would set off and cycle everywhere – half the time not quite knowing where I was going.

“I’d end up at Portobello or somewhere, then have to turn around and find my way back. I loved that. I think it is the most beautiful city architecturally in the whole of the UK. I am very fond of it and always will be.”

The youngest of three sons, Glen spent his formative years in Edinburgh. His father worked as a chartered accountant for the Scottish Investment Trust and his mother was an NHS occupational therapist.

We return to talking about acting and how what began as a student hobby has grown into a hugely successful and high-profile career. Glen’s face lights up as he joyfully reminisces about those early days treading the boards in amateur productions, including a small part in The Crucible by Arthur Miller.

“Ironically enough, I ended up playing the main role for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 20 years later, after that first performance at Aberdeen University,” he says. “Something buzzed in my mind and people were positive about it. And then, I was off. I didn’t look back.”

When it comes to favourite highlights from the vaults, Glen reels off a list of stage productions that remain close to his heart: Road at The Royal Court in London; Hamlet at Bristol Old Vic; and Macbeth at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow.

Since the late 1980s, he has become a familiar face on screens big and small, racking up a body of work that includes everything from a memorable turn as John Hanning Speke in Mountains of the Moon to appearing as Dr Alexander Isaacs in the Resident Evil horror film series.

Among his recent TV roles are the award-winning South African crime thriller Reyka, newly commissioned for a second run, and playing Batman’s alter ego Bruce Wayne in Titans. Then there is the job that cemented Glen as a household name: playing Ser Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones.

Glen has no hesitation when asked what he gets recognised for most. “Game of Thrones because it was such a massive global hit,” he says. “I can be literally anywhere in the world and will get stopped by people.”

Do fans ever give him a hard time about the show’s polarising ending? “They don’t on the whole,” says Glen. “It happens occasionally but mainly it is disappointment that there is not more of it. I think partly the problem came because people didn’t want it to finish. It was so popular.

“So, yes, it is still Game of Thrones. I am always pleasantly surprised when people say, ‘Oh, I saw you do some play at Chichester …’”

With this weekend marking the premiere of The Rig in 240 countries and territories worldwide, chances are he may soon find himself being recognised for that too.

The cast is a glorious mash-up of Line of Duty, Game of Thrones and Guilt alumni, with Glen, Compston, Bonnar and their co-stars Emun Elliott, Rochenda Sandall, Owen Teale and Mark Addy all having had roles in one – or more – of this trio of TV shows.

When I interviewed writer/creator David Macpherson during filming in 2021, he described the line-up as being akin to “the Scottish Avengers”. Glen chuckles at this nickname. “Yes, exactly,” he says. “We all got on from the word go. We got on tremendously.

“We were all staying in the same place, which is not always the case because sometimes you can be in various accommodations all over. There was fun on and off the set.

“A really great bunch of actors and, like on a rig in the North Sea, it would be predominantly Scottish, but you would get voices from all over. You would often have the company rep, the role that Emily [Hampshire] plays, from America or Canada. That is not uncommon at all.

“The mix of actors was very organic and lent itself well to the story. Sometimes you feel when you read these things, ‘Oh, they are just trying to get in that American element to tick a box …’ But this was absolutely integral to it which was good.”

Glen got to know the oil industry a bit during his stint at university in Aberdeen. “I was definitely aware of these crews that came off the rigs,” he says. “It was two weeks on, two weeks off. They would hit Aberdeen with their pockets full of money.

“But that being said, the script was a real eye-opener to me. All the various research we did brought home the reality of that world. It is a fascinating, remote and dangerous world which, unless you are inside it or part of it, is alien and unfamiliar to people.”

Did he and his castmates embrace that work hard, play hard spirit in their own downtime? “I can’t rock and roll it quite to the degree I used to,” laments Glen. “It is hard to keep up with Martin sometimes. He is a legend. Because he can bounce back, that’s the thing.

“Emily was funny. She is quite retiring. It would be difficult to get Emily out. It was a running joke with her. But she is fun and such a giggle. Owen Teale, I have worked with a few times before; Rochenda, Mark and Emun, we all, at various times, hung out a lot.”

Some of his latest projects have taken Glen to Australia (Last Days of the Space Age), Iceland (Operation Napoleon) and South Africa (Reyka). Filming in Scotland has been a rare treat, he says, and something he hasn’t got to do enough in his globe-trotting career.

“I was always disappointed that I hadn’t worked more in Scotland to be honest,” says Glen. “I have been very lucky that my career has taken me all over the place, but I always kept an eye. Ten or 20 years ago there wasn’t enough being done here.”

The Rig felt like the perfect vehicle. “It is a Scots story and a Scots production and benefits because of that,” he says. “For me, personally, it felt overdue to come back to work here. I couldn’t think of a better job to do that with.”

The Rig is available to watch exclusively on Prime Video now.

– Interview with Susan Swarbrick. A version of this interview was originally published in The Herald.

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The actor Iain Glen is known for many things, including playing Sir Richard Carlisle in Downton Abbey, Bruce Wayne in Titans and Ser Jorah Mormont in all eight seasons of Game of Thrones. But he first really hit the headlines in 1998 when he cartwheeled naked across the West End stage in The Blue Room, the play in which his co-star Nicole Kidman also disrobed, somewhat less flamboyantly — an event immortalised as “theatrical Viagra”.

“That’s the last time I took my clothes off on stage,” the 61-year-old Scot says. “It didn’t really bother me. I’ve definitely got an extrovert streak.” At the time he joked that despite his antics all the attention went to Kidman. “Yeah, exactly!” he says, laughing. “Not much attention is paid to male genitalia. Nicole was naked much less than I was, but we both had to commit to it. I’d [act nude] again if the context was right, if it wasn’t gratuitous.”

Hopeful news for the many Glen groupies out there. Other interviewers have sighed about his “piercing, soulful eyes, impeccable manners and an air of inner strength [making him] born to play romantic leads”, of how he’s “blessed with the kind of bone structure that would have made Michelangelo weep”, and declared him “hot, hot, hotter: than ever”. Does he look in the mirror and think: “Ooh, sex symbol?” Glen’s pale Scottish skin flushes in endearing embarrassment.

“I don’t know,” he says, squirming, squeezing his hands between his knees. “I just think I’ve been really lucky. My twenties, thirties, forties have all been different periods, and if people ask me what I want it’s more of just the same.” It’s a neat bit of question dodging, but fans can be reassured that Glen’s in good nick for a sexagenarian — his brow only a tad more creased and hairline slightly higher than in his striptease days. He’s a fitness nut who plays tennis regularly, walks the family labrador and cycles everywhere from his home in Dulwich, south London, but he attributes his wellbeing to his uxoriousness towards his second wife, the actress Charlotte Emmerson. “I’m very, very lucky to have met the love of my life,” he says.

He was relaxed about turning 60 last year. “In my head I’m probably still about 17,” he says in his genteel Edinburgh tones. “I’m deeply immature. But as an actor you have to retain that slightly childish curiosity about things.”

His youthful aura is boosted by hanging out with his and Emmerson’s daughters, who are 15 and 9. He has a 27-year-old son with his first wife, the actress Susannah Harker. “I feel like I’ve been bringing up children all my life,” Glen says, grinning. “Kids are very, very exhausting. But paradoxically, they keep you young because of their take on life. You’re reminded about the magic of seeing things for the first time.”

We’re sitting in a London hotel suite on a freezing day, yet Glen is in an open-neck shirt, jeans and — disconcertingly — flip flops. “I always wear flip flops. I’ve got these fat flippers for feet and I don’t get too cold. It must be the Scottish genes. I like a cold house. I’m slightly obsessed by airless, overheated rooms. Whatever public building you are in anywhere in the UK will be massively hot — I think: ‘There’s a freaking climate crisis.’ To me there’s no such thing as bad weather, it’s just bad clothes. What’s wrong with putting a jumper on? There’s always a bit of a battle with the family about it — my wife’s blood is more Mediterranean — and she, of course, will always end up getting her own way. And quite right.”

His beachy vibe is enhanced by the gold stud in his left ear. “I created that myself aged 12 or 13 with an ice cube and a pin. I had ten years of not wearing anything, but then one of my children forced [an earring] back through.” They didn’t die of embarrassment? “No, I’ve got sweet children.”

Glen goes on to tell me that he has recently returned from Sydney, where he played a “stoner surfer” in the Disney+ comedy Last Days of the Space Age. Sounds like perfect casting. He has been super-busy — there’s the forthcoming Apple TV adaptation of Hugh Howey’s dystopian novel Wool, and he’s about to film a second season of the grisly South African-set detective drama The Cane Field Killings for Channel 4. Then there’s the show we’re here to talk about, Amazon’s The Rig, a supernatural thriller set on an oil rig cut off by fog in the North Sea, where something very nasty lurks in the stormy waters.

In this claustrophobic setting, Glen plays the increasingly spooked crew’s leader. “Working on a rig is a fairly high-risk profession — I think that’s why people are drawn to the oil industry. There’s fast bucks to be earned, it’s high-intensity work and you’re in an isolated space in a very alien, dangerous environment. It doesn’t matter whether you’re outside on the platforms or inside the control — the stakes are incredibly high, and there’s a huge onus to maximise profits.”

It was a perfect fit for Glen, who, in what he admits laughingly is “a slightly crap parallel”, has always been an adrenaline junkie, diving off the highest board at the Commonwealth Pool in Edinburgh as a child, skydiving and doing the highest bungee jump in the world in South Africa. “I love doing those things — but always with a safety net. It actually feels a little bit like acting. You recreate these dangerous situations, but you know you’re fundamentally in a safe place.”

Most of The Rig’s shoot happened not, mercifully, out at sea but on a meticulously constructed set in the Edinburgh seaside suburb of Leith, not far from where Glen, whose father was an accountant, grew up. “I was a rebel in a slightly middle-class fashion,” he says. “I struggled at school, I was not academic.”

He went on to the University of Aberdeen, but having discovered acting there dropped out to go to Rada. Since then the work has not stopped. Game of Thrones, of course, is what he’s best known for, his character Ser Jorah Mormont, lovelorn counsellor to Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), one of the very few to survive ten years without being violently killed off. When Glen signed up he had no idea of the juggernaut he was joining.

“The pilot was disastrous. I think there were something like 52 pages and we had to reshoot 48 of them. But season by season it became a global phenomenon.” Some actors resent being known for blockbusters, but Glen laughs as he says: “I don’t think: ‘Why don’t you know me for my Henry V at Stratford?’ Those were heady days — if you can’t enjoy that, then you’re not going to enjoy much.”

Like many cast members, Glen cried when the series wrapped a decade ago. “It had been a massive adventure ride.” But the jobs have kept coming, to his delight. “I have that sense, like a lot of actors, that if anything I’m the total opposite of ‘hot, hot, hot’ — it’s: ‘When am I going to be found out?’ I don’t want to sound disingenuous, but I can’t believe I keep getting away with this.”

Iain Glen’s perfect weekend

Dry Jan or Big Jan?
Dry Jan

Lie-in or early start?
Early start

Signature dish?
Roast chicken with roast potatoes and bread sauce

Brunch or pub lunch?
Pub lunch

Your phone screensaver?
My youngest girl with a quirky expression on her face

I couldn’t get through the weekend without . . .
A game of tennis

– Interview with Julia Llewellyn Smith. A version of this interview was originally published in The Times.

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How the oil industry drama helped the Edinburgh actor rediscover his home city

Game of Thrones star Iain Glen is delighted to be back in Edinburgh as he talks about his new six part thriller The Rig. Filmed entirely in Scotland at Leith’s FirstStage Studios and offshore, it kicks off as an action drama based on a North Sea oil rig and quickly dives into chiller, supernatural territory when a mysterious fog sweeps in and the rig is hit by tremors. With all communication lines down and mysterious forces unleashed from the depths, it’s down to the crew of Kinloch Bravo to fight for survival, led by Glen as the Offshore Installation Manager Magnus MacMillan.

Written by David Macpherson whose father worked on the rigs, directed by John Strickland as well as Alex Holmes, alongside Glen The Rig stars Schitt’s Creek’s Emily Hampshire, Martin Compston and Mark Bonnar.

For 61-year-old Glen who lives in London with his actor wife Charlotte Emmerson and three children Finlay, Mary and Juliet, it was an opportunity to return home, catch up with his mum and dad and rediscover his home city. He sits down with The Scotsman before the show launches on Amazon Prime Video on Friday. [6 January]

IT’S A SUPERNATURAL THRILLER WITH MYSTERIOUS FOGS, TREMORS, LOSS OF COMMUNICATION, WHAT IS GOING ON?

Well without giving too much away, there is a theme running through The Rig which is we should start questioning what we are doing to planet Earth. There are lots of things happening in the world currently that suggest that we may be putting nature off balance and that comes to pass during the course of this drama.

It is a supernatural thriller but the supernatural element is borne of the planet beginning to bite back and ask us is it right to be drilling huge holes in this unknown territory, the ocean bed? It has a relevance, a pertinence, to issues today, probably the most important issue facing humanity broadly just now and something that we’re far too slowly awakening ourselves to and so there’s a very, very strong message. But it’s not didactic and it’s not trying to educate in the wrong way. The supernatural element has an awful tangible plausibility which makes it particularly strong and scary.

FILMING WAS A MASSIVE UNDERTAKING WITH HUGE SETS BUILT IN THE STUDIO AND IMPRESSIVE SPECIAL EFFECTS, ARE YOU PLEASED WITH THE FINAL CUT?

Yes, there was a prolonged post post production period because of the VFX effects so you come back to it all that time later with fresh eyes, so I was delighted and excited to see the way it had all come together.

The vast majority was shot in the studio in Leith but we also bled outside. We were in the water at Leith, in the North Sea and they were using drones. And the special effects are done brilliantly – I was there and I find it very hard to discern what is VFX and what isn’t.

WHAT WAS THE SET THEY BUILT LIKE?

Almost triple storey The height of the studio was vast. Half the time we were kind of suspended mid level so were able to look down and it allowed shooting at all sort of different angles and got the scale of a rig.

Over three or four months we began in the control room, the most complex set, then as we shot another set would emerge; the medical facility, dining area, corridors, all forming around us. Even without Covid, I can’t imagine any other way of shooting because it’s completely impractical to get a cast and crew onto a rig for any length of time and the majority of the time out in the middle of the North Sea you don’t want to spend too much time outside unless your job dictates you need to.

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN ON AN OIL RIG?

I have not. But the research they gave us was very powerful – documentaries, not least Fire in the Night about the Piper Alpha disaster – and literature and people coming to speak to us and the writer David Macpherson had first hand knowledge through his father.

My main reference point was Derek Anderson who is a recently retired OIM (Offshore Installation Manager) which is what I was playing. He read the script and highlighted anything he felt inconsistent or implausible and it was reassuring that he was very happy and there while we shot.

THE RIG TALKS ABOUT DECOMMISSIONING AND THE WAY FORWARD WITH THE NORTH SEA.

Yeah, I think part of the beauty of the writing is that David manages within 20 minutes of the first episode to establish a kind of the normal life in a rig, the interaction between the staff and we understand who everyone is, what they’re up to and maybe their primary character traits. That’s really elegant writing. And we do need to care about people before the shit hits the fan and things start to go off kilter. During the course of the series we get to know these people in extremis.

The rig is just the perfect setting: if you take this gigantic structure totally isolated in the middle of the North Sea, it’s like a cauldron atmosphere with high intensity, high danger work, even on a normal day and when things go wrong in that environment they go seriously wrong, so it makes for perfect drama.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE MAGNUS MACMILLAN?

Level-headed. His motto is that he’ll get everyone home safe. He’s made huge sacrifices and had huge loss in his personal life which has meant that the life on the rig has become his family so he cares a great deal about the people he’s looking after. They will always come first. But you’re in an unenviable position as an off-shore installation manager in that you are the voice of the company. He is party to information that will affect the crew but is legally obliged not to reveal it, so that’s in the ether as well and he’s under immense pressure. His level-headedness is tested to its limit and goes beyond its limit. One of the reasons I was attracted to the role was that the qualities we see in him are always polar opposites; you see one person and then you see the underbelly, you see what’s made him the way he is.

MAGNUS MACMILLAN SAYS ‘ON THE BRAVO WE STICK TO PROCEDURE BECAUSE WHEN WE DON’T PEOPLE DIE.’ THAT IS CALLED INTO QUESTION ISN’T IT?

Yes. There are myriad protocols you’re supposed to follow but there are a whole bunch of variables that hit that they have never encountered before and then you’re in virgin territory and it’s the qualities of the people there and how they can react. So Magnus has leadership qualities, the ability to handle personnel and try to keep everyone sweet but he’s forced into a very, very unfamiliar situation and therein lies the drama.

IT’S QUITE A DIFFERENT KIND OF DRAMA.

It is. There is this supernatural element but it is grounded in the world in which it takes place. I also think that it is quite sure-footed. Extraordinary things happen but it’s not afraid to pause and ask for attention to the detail of the geology that’s going on. We’re very attached to our present, but if you think of the life of the planet going back millennia, aeons, there have been ice ages, extinctions throughout the life of the planet at a scale at time impossible for us to hold in our minds. But that’s what the drama gets into, that the planet is speaking in a way that echoes right back to when it was formed.

So there’s a richness to it and an ecological message but it doesn’t get bogged down in it; it remains a fast-moving, epic kind of supernatural thriller. It’s not just an action piece, or something that’s got no basis in reality, it feels like it carries an important message.

IT WAS NICE TO SEE EMILY HAMPSHIRE IN SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TO SCHITT’S CREEK, DID YOU WATCH THAT?

Yeah, I did watch Schitt’s Creek. She’s lovely and I think she does it very, very well. I think we have a really strong British cast along with Emily and you get that lovely mix on a rig because they’re often owned by American/Canadian companies and it’s not unusual for a woman to be in the role she plays so nothing’s twisted out of shape to try and accommodate a drama. We all got on very well and I think we have fond memories of it. It’s definitely one of the most enjoyable jobs I’ve ever done.

DO YOU THINK THERE WILL BE ANOTHER SERIES?

We’ll just have to wait and see. It’s definitely possible.

WHAT WAS THE BEST THING ABOUT FILMING IN SCOTLAND?

Being close to my mum and dad in Edinburgh. I always come back and see my folks, but I can count on one hand the work I’ve done here.

I studied English in Aberdeen for a couple of years and we took plays to the Edinburgh Fringe and at the end of my second year I missed a sociology resit to perform in Bent by Martin Sherman. It was a bit of a crossroads. Then I was lucky enough to get offered a place at RADA soon after so went down to London.

The thing that got me going as an actor was a feature called Silent Scream which was about Larry Winters, a contemporary of Jimmy Boyle’s in Barlinnie [Directed by David Hayman and also Robert Carlyle’s debut film], and then I did the Scottish play with Michael Boyd at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow and a series called Glasgow Kiss, then a couple of bits of theatre like The Seagull in Edinburgh at the Festival, but not enough over the course of 30 plus years. So I was really happy to get back here for The Rig and be able to pop in and see mum and dad whenever. Much as I love the series, I really loved the proximity of being here and being back in the city for that length of time because it’s great.

DID YOU REDISCOVER EDINBURGH?

I really honestly did. I rediscovered it walking and on a bike. There are so many brilliant trails around here. I’m a keen cyclist and I really got to know the city that way, along the canals and walkways and footpaths because they intersect everywhere, north, south, east, west.

It is different if you’re not here for just a weekend or snatched week, but living, buying your food and staying here. I had an apartment close to St Andrew Square and all the cast were in the same place. Yeah, I kind of got to know it again.

WHERE’S YOUR FAVOURITE PLACE TO EAT IN EDINBURGH?

You’re spoiled for choice around St Andrew Square but my favourite is still my mum’s food. Her roast chicken, roast potatoes and bread sauce.

THE RIG HAS A SCI-FI ELEMENT. YOU’VE BEEN IN OTHER SCI-FI PRODUCTIONS RECENTLY, SUCH AS TIDES (FILM) AND WOOL (TV). DO YOU LIKE THIS GENRE?

Absolutely. Drama’s great at breaking open the possibilities of the world in which we live and trying to suggest things beyond our ken and it’s always dramatically interesting to go to those places. I’ve always enjoyed them, but when they have a resonance, a plausibility about them, then it’s the most powerful. Game of Thrones also has a kind of beyond our ken, supernatural element to it, but again it’s woven in very subtly and doesn’t overpower it ever.

IS GAME OF THRONES WHAT PEOPLE MOST RECOGNISE YOU FROM?

Yeah for sure. It’s always nice when people say I saw you playing Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Company but nine times out of ten it’s Game of Thrones. Because it was globally such a massive hit it doesn’t matter if it’s Edinburgh or Timbuktu, you’re as likely to get recognition, which on the whole is a lovely thing.

YOU’VE ALSO DONE MUSICALS, PERIOD DRAMAS AND A LOT OF THEATRE. IF THERE’S ONE THING YOU WOULD LIKE PEOPLE TO HAVE SEEN YOU ACT IN WOULD IT BE HENRY V?

No, no it wouldn’t. I’ve been incredibly lucky. There are just different chapters in a career. When I left RADA I thought theatre would dominate and there were periods when it did and periods when it didn’t but I’m happy for anyone to have seen anything as long as they enjoyed it. And recognition is sweet on the whole, because random strangers complimenting you, who wouldn’t like that?

WHAT DO YOU STILL WANT TO DO?

Honestly, more of the same. I don’t covet anything I’ve not done because that’s a recipe for disappointment. The last job I did was a feature set in the First World War, but prior to that I was in Australia doing a comedy for Disney Plus called The Last Days of the Space Age and comedy’s always fun. I used to do a lot more on stage and always enjoyed it. It’s not necessarily something people associate me with so yes, if anything, a bit more comedy.

WHAT SKILLS HAVE YOU LEARNT IN ACTING THAT YOU USE IN OTHER PARTS OF YOUR LIFE?

I suppose drama’s good for presentation, just being comfortable in your skin. It is a process. You never get to the end of it. But to most people it’s a really alien thing, pretending to be somebody else and having a camera stuck in your face. It’s fairly odd and disconcerting so it takes a particular type I suppose. I’m not a particularly confident person, I’m quite a shy person, but if I’m given lines I believe in or can inhabit something that makes sense to me then I’m desperate to show it to others. If I’m working on something and I don’t, then acting remains agony, you just think ‘oh god, why do I have to wander on stage saying this because I don’t quite believe myself’. That’s why I admire writers more than anyone because they give actors their worlds.

YOU STUDIED LITERATURE, MAYBE THAT’S WHY YOU APPRECIATE THE WRITING?

Maybe. I was quite dyslexic as a child and at the time it really wasn’t highlighted. I’m not sure how severe it was but certainly the formal academic route was not something that suited me particularly. You just feel you’re not keeping up and you’re made to feel a bit stupid.

But I always enjoyed stories and pretend, so I felt lucky to accidentally fall into acting. I still haven’t lost the joy of that. I love acting as much as I ever did, I feel very blessed, lucky to have found the thing that ticks for me. I’ve no idea if there are other worlds that I could have occupied and been as content and fired up to do the best that I can but, if I look back over the decades I’m as enthused now as I ever was.

Iain Glen stars in The Rig on Amazon Prime Video from 6 January.

– Interview with Janet Christie

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The Game of Thrones actor remembers meeting ‘childhood god’ David Bowie, witnessing the birth of his kids and his career highlight

Iain Glen, 60, is an award-winning Scottish actor familiar to millions from his roles as Ser Jorah in Game of Thrones, Bruce Wayne in Titans and Sir Richard Carlisle in Downton Abbey. In the new South African Channel 4 series The Cane Field Killings he plays a child abductor trying to secure his release from prison. Married for the second time, Glen lives in south London with his wife, Charlotte, and three children, Finlay, Mary and Juliet.

Best encounter with a celebrity?

I was doing this play at the Donmar Warehouse called Here, written by Michael Frayn, in 1993. It wasn’t quite functioning and we somehow managed to not fill this little space – which is actually quite difficult to do – but during this one matinée, there was this vocal laughter coming from the audience. You can creep into the little lighting booth and peek out, so I did and I was like, “F—— hell, that’s David Bowie!” My absolute childhood god: and there he was laughing at me on stage. Someone suggested we say hello afterwards, but I couldn’t do the “Hi, I’m a fan!” thing. So it wasn’t really an “encounter” as such, but still…

Best thing a fan has ever said to you?

You get used to keeping your eyes down, particularly when it’s busy. I mean, 99 per cent of the time it’s lovely – what’s not to like, when people say, “Oh, I loved you in this or that”? – but sometimes you’re busy and, on this occasion, I was at an airport when I sensed this woman’s physicality. I know that she recognised me, but I pushed on, intent upon getting a coffee. On the way back, the lady was waiting and asked: “Oh, excuse me, are you Ser Jorah?” I say: “Yes, I am.” She says: “Would you mind saying something to me? Can you just look me in the eye and say [the name of Game of Thrones character] ‘Khaleesi’?” There are mock-ups of things on YouTube of every single time I say “Khaleesi”, you know, making me look ridiculous – but she wanted me to say it to her, so I did. And she said: “Oh, thank you, thank you.” But the way she did it, she was so terribly earnest, and it felt like it meant a great deal to her.

Best moment of your career?

My dad’s a wonderful man. As a chartered accountant he operated in a completely different world and [before dementia] was very dry, very typically Scottish. So I remember when I did The Crucible with the RSC – I was playing John Proctor who goes through this extraordinary arc in the play, ending up with his life in ruins, having to deny his own existence in a way – and my dad came into dressing room afterwards. I said: “So, what do you think?” And he burst into tears. He didn’t say why he liked it, but that was a highlight seeing my dad’s reaction.

Best experience in your life?

The best thing that’s ever happened in my life is witnessing the birth of my children – and one in particular, Mary. I am fairly useless in these situations because it is unbelievable to see somebody you love go through that. My wife gave birth to this beautiful baby girl and I’m in tears. And the midwife said: “Do you want to tell the mother what the child is?” And I mistook the umbilical cord for a penis and said, crying: “It’s a boy, it’s a boy!” And the midwife said, “No, no it’s not, it’s the other.” The great thing about having children is that it does teach you the nature of altruistic love. Children demand that of you and it’s good for the soul.

Best thing you’ve bought?

I’ve got a Martin acoustic guitar, which I bought in New York when I was doing The Blue Room [on Broadway] with Nicole Kidman there. Martin guitars are much cheaper there. It’s probably worth about double what I paid for it now, and it’s the perfect guitar for singing without an amplifier. Actually, my office got broken into about a year ago, and they stole all my recording equipment, but for some reason they didn’t take the guitar and I was ever so grateful.

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Worst childhood memory?

I’m always haunted by this memory. My uncle was a Church of Scotland minister on Iona. My family went to see him on holiday once and visited this crystal mine [the island’s green marble quarry], but while we were walking back over these undulating hills I must have been distracted by something, because when I looked up everyone had gone. I was petrified. I started to run and after 10 minutes panicking I found this house and started knocking on the door saying: “I’ve lost my family.” I heard, “Hello, can I help you?” and at that moment, my mother shouted from behind me: “Iain, there you are!” It’s one of those recurring things where you know where you are and you’re secure, then suddenly being alone, lost and confused. It’s always haunted me. It’s that sense of, “I know what I’m doing, I’m super confident” and then suddenly thinking, “I do not have a clue.” I can have that sensation at any time; I get that little tug in my solar plexus and remember emerging from that crystal mine.

Worst pet moment?

Every time I leave to go and work, different animals appear in my house: it’s like they just wait for me to go. We’ve got lizards, a tortoise, two cats, hamsters, about 10 fish, and a labrador called Pippa – she’s an absolute delight. My worst pet moment does not really concern me but my friend [Bafta-winning actor] Jason Watkins. We were both accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at the same time. When I got my acceptance letter I cheered and ran around the garden, jumping up and down. Jason opened his letter, jumped up in the air going, “Yay!” – and landed on his cat. They had to have the cat put down. Imagine the best moment of your life absolutely ruined a second later by the death of your favourite pet.

Worst thing about technology?

I love playing the guitar and my little office at the bottom of the garden is also a wee recording studio. I have this piece of software, Logic Pro, and I just about piece it together and put it on single tracks. It is extraordinary in terms of what it can do, and yet I use 0.00001 per cent of its capacity, as I just try and plug the mic into the right slot and hit the right buttons. It is agonising. At one point I got a Logic Pro person to help me, but within a week I’d forgotten everything.

Worst thing about being an actor?

On the whole, producers don’t trust actors at all. They think that we’ll take drugs and get lost somewhere overnight if we’re not picked up and taken from A to B – even going from trailer to set. It’s rather pathetic really. So over a lifetime of being an actor, I’ve no sense of direction at all. My wife is always taking the p— out of me because I’ve never had to bother with directions.

Worst moment of your career?

I was playing Henry V with the RSC at Stratford [in 1994] and there is quite a well-known scene at Southampton docks where Henry realises there are three traitors in his ranks – the Earl of Cambridge, Lord Scroop and Sir Thomas Grey, if memory serves. At one point I had to grab Cambridge and throw him on the ground, but my trajectory must have been off. Anyway, after I’d thrown him I saw this actor slide on his breastplate, half the length of the stage and fall off the front. He just disappeared. And then, like a cartoon, I saw one hand come back on stage, then the other, with an elderly member of the audience pushing him back up. And I was gone. I could not stop laughing, then the audience started to laugh. The play was suspended for about 30 seconds as my shoulders were pumping up and down. To recover  from that was incredibly hard. The best corpsing moments on stage are always ones that happen accidentally.

– Interview by Bill Borrows

All episodes of The Cane Field Killings are available to stream on All 4 now

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The Scots actor talks to James Rampton about playing an incarcerated paedophile in his new South Africa-set detective drama, this year’s Oscars, the DC Universe… and that controversial ending

It is the Spanish super-fans who go particularly wild for Iain Glen. Whenever they see the Game of Thrones star in the street, they are instantly transported into a state of delirious excitement.

The 60-year-old Scottish actor, who played fan favourite Ser Jorah Mormont, the loyal counsel to his unrequited love, the Mother of Dragons, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), for all eight series of Game of Thrones, takes up the story. “I always thought the Spanish were slightly less effusive, but the fans there are wonderful.”

All the same, Glen concedes, occasionally the Spanish aficionados can go slightly over the top. “People just completely grab you and start kissing you and taking selfies without permission, but somehow the Spanish do it in a way that is very forgivable!”

That level of attention could prove irksome, but the actor takes it in very good spirit. Glen, who is married to actor Charlotte Emmerson and has three children, is clearly comfortable with the profile that HBO’s adaptation of George RR Martin’s bestselling novels has conferred on him. “Who could begrudge on a daily basis someone saying, ‘Hey, I can’t believe it, you’re fantastic’? I think most people in life could do with a bit of that.”

The other side of the fans’ passion for Game of Thrones, however, is that they feel really possessive of the show and are quick to voice their displeasure. For instance, many of the show’s millions of fans were dissatisfied with the ending of the drama in 2019. Some even launched a petition asking the producers to remake the whole final season. They saw it as rushed and thought it failed to do justice to characters they had forged a deep relationship with over the previous eight years.

Glen acknowledges their unhappiness about the conclusion to Game of Thrones. “Where it landed in the end was not what a lot of what people wanted,” he says, “but Game of Thrones had done that from the beginning, and it had always been exciting. No one wanted Ned Stark to get beheaded in the first season – ‘no, that is really wrong, that couldn’t happen!’ – but he did. And so throughout the series, those sorts of unexpected things happened.”

For all that, Glen would not have changed anything about the resolution of Game of Thrones. “I wouldn’t have done anything differently. Being inside it, I really could understand and supported the decisions that were made by the writers and where they took the story. But Game of Thrones is like my child, so maybe it’s no surprise for me to say that!”

The latest character Glen is playing is the polar opposite of the morally upstanding Ser Jorah. In the South African detective drama The Cane Field Killings, which arrives on Channel 4 on Sunday, he portrays a malevolent child abductor, the fictional Angus Speelman.

In this chilling eight-part drama, Reyka Gama (played by Kim Engelbrecht), the woman Speelman kidnapped as a 12-year-old girl 22 years earlier, is now a highly regarded, if troubled, criminal profiler. As she investigates a series of grisly murders in the sugar cane fields of KwaZulu-Natal, she finds herself increasingly drawn to her imprisoned former captor. Even when cooped up in a high-security jail wearing an orange boiler suit, he manages to get inside her head.

Exhibiting a form of “Stockholm Syndrome”, Reyka is soon enmeshed in the web spun by this darkly seductive criminal. As Speelman, Glen exudes an understated yet undeniable menace that makes your skin crawl. If Ser Jorah is saintly, Speelman is satanic.

There is more than a hint of Hannibal Lecter about Speelman. “I would absolutely make that comparison,” says Glen. “It did cross my mind when I was playing this character. As with Lecter, you have a female police investigator coming to visit him in jail.

“Speelman is also a very cultured, very intelligent man, and he’s a great reader of minds. Like a lot of those very manipulative, evil people, he’s very good at understanding what makes people tick. He knows their pressure points and how to play them. He knows where their weak areas are. So certainly, Mr Hopkins did flash through my mind a few times!”

The actor did not find it hard to inhabit this very sinister character, he laughs. “I have played the odd psycho in the past, people from the more disturbed end of things. It comes disconcertingly easily to me. I don’t know why that is. I’m lovely! I look after my wife!”

People love to take extreme positions, and you’ve got to be able to express them in one or two sentences – that really takes nuance out of any debate

Glen, who possesses an easygoing charm matched by a mellifluous Edinburgh burr, was also drawn to The Cane Field Killings because, “like all those great Scandi dramas, not only did it take you on a terrific thriller ride, it also gave you a wonderful insight into society. It shows you a cross-section of South African society, from the very poorest to the landowning wealthiest.

“It’s a state-of-the-nation piece. As a tourist, you can enjoy all the many treats that South Africa has to offer. It has beautiful landscape and great culture, food and wine. But there’s still awful inequality in in that country, as there is in so many places in the world.”

However, “it seems more extreme in South Africa somehow. There is a very, very good quality of life for some. But when you fly in, you pass vast swathes of townships, and there is a lot of poverty that is really visible on the street. That is very disconcerting.”

The other character that Glen has portrayed recently is Bruce Wayne (Batman’s alter ego) in the US series Titans. It is part of the ever-expanding DC Universe. Does the actor worry that these comic book franchises are in danger of stifling more original, independent productions? “No. I think it’s OK. I think they occupy different worlds and offer different types of films that people want to watch.”

For all his success, Glen, you sense, is relieved not to be a Hollywood big shot, with all the hassle that entails. For instance, he is understanding about the stresses that may have contributed to the “What on earth?” moment when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars last week.

Without ever wishing to condone violence, the actor reflects, “it was bizarre, and I think that no one comes out of it particularly well. But it’s easy to underestimate the pressure that the whole evening brings. We don’t know if people are going through private nightmares of their own. Sometimes a joke can tap into something which is really sensitive.

“It was a poor joke that was badly reacted to. But it’s very easy to be overly condemning. I think that we have to be forgiving when apologies are made. Obviously, it was very distressing for everyone, but I would always err on the side of saying, ‘We’ve all made mistakes.’”

The enormity of the incident was, of course, magnified millions of times over on social media. Glen is uneasy about how the internet has exacerbated the polarisation of society. “People love to take extreme positions, and you’ve got to be able to express them in one or two sentences. And so that really does take nuance out of any debate.”

So how does Glen switch off from the pressures of the job? He loves to play the guitar, but has no plans to emulate Russell Crowe and embark on a world tour. “Definitely not! No, no, no! Playing the guitar is just something I’ve always done for my own sanity while I’m away. It’s a perfect complement to location work because you do spend a lot of time hanging around as an actor. It’s something that I’ve always just done for friends and family.”

How do his children respond to his guitar playing, then? “They just tell me to shut up!”

‘The Cane Field Killings’ starts on Channel 4 at 10pm on Sunday 10 April

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We loved him as the helpless-in-love warrior Ser Jorah Mormont in the highly acclaimed TV show ‘Game of Thrones’ and now there’s buzz around Iain Glen’s recent venture as mystery man Alexander Wilson of spy thriller ‘Mrs Wilson’.

Starring as novelist and former MI6 officer Alexander “Alec” Wilson, a deceased man around whom the entire show is based, after his widowed wife finds out the reality behind her marriage to him, Hollywood actor Iain Glen speaks to WION exclusively about the complicated and multi-layered role and how he found out that the best way to approach the role was to commit to what he felt was “a truth”.

Watch the trailer of Mrs Wilson here:

On how he got into the skin of the character, Alexander Wilson, who is surrounded by conflicting accounts and assumptions, Iain said, “You have to make up your mind up as an actor. Then you let the audience make up their own mind. The fact of the matter is that Ruth and her relatives who have looked with great intensity at the subject and him, still remain slightly unsure as to where he actually fell. So, who am I to say?”

The series has a star-studded cast with the protagonist Alison Wilson’s character played by her own granddaughter and actor Ruth Wilson.

The ‘GoT’ star agrees he learnt a lot of the ways and machinations of the Secret Intelligence Service during this period of British history. The idea of playing a role for your country is something any actor will relate to, but he was fascinated by the fact that many played these roles for survival. “You come across it in various fictions that you’ve read and films that you’ve seen, for example in John Le Carré. I’ve been aware of it. I definitely developed sympathy. If the nature of your work is that you have to occupy a role that you have to commit to, and if you’re very, very good at your job then you do that very completely,” the actor said. 

He added, “Of course, there’s a huge overlap with your work as an actor, because that’s what we do. We pretend to be different people and then we can go home to our family at the end of the day’s work. But of course, in that context, you can’t. It’s mind-bending, I imagine it would be, and it definitely gave me sympathy for Alec.”

While Ruth guided him in finding a trajectory for his role as Alexander, Iain admits that at a certain point, he had to let go and trust his own take on the material. “You can’t be too doggedly attached to the actuality because it often doesn’t make for great drama,” he explains his approach.  “You sometimes condense things. I don’t think it was departing from the truth, I think it was just highlighting the truth. When we spoke, Ruth made it clear that deep down she didn’t really know the truth. That, in a way, was a liberation of sorts. You think, ‘Well if you don’t know, how can I think if we’ve done it right then and the audience will be left to its own conclusions. Some will very clearly conclude one thing, and some will conclude very clearly another thing and others will say well, who knows. But that’s what those who knew the story felt, so we’re all being put on that journey with this story.”

‘Mrs. Wilson’ is a spy thriller based on the true story of actress Ruth Wilson’s grandmother, Alison, who discovered the mysterious death of her husband. The entire story takes a twist as Mrs. Wilson learns that she is not the only wife of her husband Alec. The series stars Ruth Wilson, Iain Glen, Keeley Hawes & Indian actor Anupam Kher in lead roles. The series is written by Anna Symon and directed by Richard Laxton.

‘Mrs Wilson’ is currently streaming on Lionsgate Play from February 11, 2022.

– Zeba Khan

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Actor Iain Glen breaks down his character, Angus Speelman, and his sinister agenda in local crime drama Reyka.

We’re counting down to crime drama Reyka, the latest jewel in M-Net’s (DStv channel 101) crown of local drama series, which premieres on Sunday, 25 July.

The series recently celebrated its World Première at the 60th Monte Carlo Television Festival, where it was praised for its authenticity and unique storytelling by international TV- and filmmakers.

British actor Iain Glen, who plays Reyka’s unsettling villain, Angus Speelman, is best known for his roles in series like Downton Abbey (Sir Richard Carlisle) and Game of Thrones (Ser Jorah Mormont). We stepped into detective Reyka’s shoes to pick Iain’s brain about the sinister Speelman and what drove him to kidnap 11-year-old Reyka.

Becoming Speelman

“I got the opportunity to go to Cape Town to work on some projects, and from there it was just planning my schedule around the pandemic to get to Durban and set aside 6 weeks to be a part of Reyka,” Iain revealed while attending the Monte Carlo Television Festival.

He jokingly added, “And when I got there, I offered my best South African accent to play Speelman, but the producers decided it’s better to keep my Scottish accent.”

Series producer Serena Cullen confessed to personally convincing Iain to come to South Africa for the role of Speelman.

“I knew we had to get international talent to be part of the show if we wanted to distribute Reyka to the international audiences,” she says, and that is how Iain ended up playing a Scottish immigrant banana farmer in Kwa-Zulu Natal.

Who is Angus Speelman?

Speelman is a dangerous man with the face and demeanour of a loving father and husband. All is not as it seems with this man, though. “He is obsessed with creating the perfect family,” Iain explains.

And when he gets that perfect family, he will devote everything he has to it until there comes a time when he wants more, and that is where the horror seeps in. “It’s always fun to play the baddie,” says Iain.

“But Speelman has a very specific and, I think, well-researched pathology that I found very interesting to try and personify.”

Reyka became one of Speelman’s victims when she was just 11 years old, but there is something different about her. In the first episode, viewers see the strange dynamic between the now-adult Reyka (played by Kim Engelbrecht) and Speelman when he summons her to the prison where he has been locked up for over 22 years.

“Speelman needs Reyka to help facilitate his release,” Iain explains. “And he will try every manipulating trick in the book to obtain her trust again.”

The problem is that Reyka is susceptible to him, and if she allows him, he could be her downfall…

“These were very enjoyable and involving scenes to play. Kim is a wonderful actress, and we spent a lot of time talking about the content of each scene as we tried to mine, access and then submerge as much of the subtext as possible for 2 damaged characters who have a long history,” says Iain.

“It’s a very particular thing when you are playing people who have known each other incredibly intensely and intimately 25 years previously, but then you have this huge chasm of absence before they reconnect. Both characters try to understand where they stand with each other. Do their memories coincide or conflict?”

Excitement for Reyka 

Aside from the storyline between Reyka and Speelman, viewers will also follow Reyka as she tracks down a serial killer.

“The script encompasses many aspects of South African society, from the very rich and powerful to the poorest and dispossessed. It’s a compelling crime thriller, and it follows the police as they try to solve a series of brutal and inexplicable murders in the cane fields of KwaZulu-Natal,” says Iain.

Iain says that he is super excited for Reyka to première in SA and abroad. “All the elements were in place to make a fantastic TV show. Most importantly, a stunning script from Rohan Dixon. The show has a vast sweep and feels like a state of the nation piece for South Africa. I’m the least qualified to say that, as it’s not my homeland, but I have been lucky to work in South Africa many times over the years,” adds Iain.

Watch Reyka S1 from Sunday, 25 July on M-Net (DStv channel 101) at 20:00

M-Net (DStv channel 101) is available exclusively on DStv Premium. To upgrade your existing package, click here. Or if you’d like to Get DStv, find a service that suits your needs here.

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“We’ve kept people waiting, and I thank people for their patience, but I hope it’ll make sense, when people see it, that it took a bit of time to get it right.”

The two-part, true-life mini-series Mrs. Wilson (airing on Masterpiece on PBS) tells the story of Alison McKelvie (Ruth Wilson) who fell in love with Major Alexander Wilson (Iain Glen) after meeting him while working a secretarial job with the Secret Intelligence Service. During the years of their marriage, Alison believed that her husband was a popular author of spy novels who was also doing real intelligence work for the war effort, only to find out that he actually had other wives and other families, making her wonder whether she ever really knew him, at all.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, actor Iain Glen talked about being a part of telling this incredible true-life story, the surreal nature of being a part of this project, how he approached understanding who Alec Wilson was, the research he did for the role, and the appreciation he had for the man by the end of the shoot. He also talked about being a part of the hugely popular HBO series Game of Thrones, in which he’s played Jorah Mormont throughout its run, what it’s like for an actor to go on a journey like that, why these last episodes justifies their longer lengths, and how emotional it was to have a big cast read-through for the entire final season.

Collider:  I had heard a bit about this story prior to seeing this project, but it’s so fascinating and compelling to learn about the details of it all.

IAIN GLEN:  I’m very grateful for how well the whole thing has turned out. I feel for Ruth, and I’m so pleased for her. It was an extraordinary journey that she went on with this. She knew she had this incredibly complicated history in her family, with this one figure, in particular, which had been a part of her childhood. And then, she became an actor and the pressure gently built to manifest the story for a drama. And then, she had to put the right people together, find a fantastic writer, and find the right production to realize it. So, for it to have been come out and have done as well as it has, it’s an amazing journey to go on. It’s very easy to look at this and say, “This is extraordinary, what happened.” It’s a very different thing to find the right writer to actually structure it and make the story follow revelation after revelation, to come out satisfyingly, and for us to retain sympathy, throughout. I think that it’s a very compelling story, psychologically, and that’s what I’m most pleased about. It’s based in the truth, so it’s very, very riveting, which is what you look and hope for in drama.

Did you know, from the beginning, that this was a true story and that it was her family’s story?

GLEN:  I did, yeah. They asked me to do it, and then Ruth and I met in Belfast. All I had done was read three scripts, which had been sent to me, while she’d lived with this project, for years and years and years. But we actually had a very similar take on it, and that was quite reassuring for both of us, in a funny way.

Did you ever have a moment where it just seemed bizarre and surreal that you were playing your co-star’s actual grandfather while she was playing her own grandmother?

GLEN: I had a little moment, yes, I did. It doesn’t seem like a significant moment, but Ruth’s mum and dad came, and they played little extra roles within the drama in one scene. I was in the make-up caravan, getting into being Alec Wilson, and Ruth was beside me, getting into being Alison Wilson, and then her mum and dad came in and went, “Hello, how are you?” She sat in there and asked me how it was all going and said, “I’m very pleased that you’re playing the role.” It was just a bizarre, strange mix of reality and drama going on, where sometimes you can feel incredibly silly dressing up in funny clothes and pretending to be people. All I can say is that Ruth and her family always made it feel that they were really happy with what I was up to, and to just to keep doing what I was doing.

You were playing a real guy, but you couldn’t talk to him because he’s not with us anymore, and it seems that nobody really fully knew who he was or why he did what he did. How did you approach finding him?

GLEN:  What you’re actually asking is, what was the motivator? What was it that made you do the things that you did? We know what he did. We know that he got involved with different women, and that he married them and had children with them. We also know that he was of the Secret Service, and that he was a very successful novelist. So, I had all of the facts, and then I had scenes that showed those things. You have to be a little bit careful, as an actor, to not want to rationalize it so much that you have a total clarity of the subtext that’s going on. All you can do is play each scene for what it is. You just play each moment for what it is, and you let it add up to what it adds up to. In his lifetime, all of his various wives had no idea, whatsoever, that he had these other scenarios going on.

So, in any given moment, during the course of their realities, there were no signals saying, “Something weird is going on here,” or that he had another life that he was not telling anyone about. Otherwise, it makes them all quite stupid people. He was very able to be in the present and inhabit the moment that he was inhabiting. That’s what he had to do. His life was endangered, if his cover was blown, so that made him a very successful operative. Without shirking it, I didn’t try to rationalize. I didn’t try to find the answers because, if Ruth’s family, who had studied him and tried to understand, hadn’t quite worked out, it felt silly of me to try.

It’s so interesting because he obviously loved each of these families, and they all really loved him.

GLEN:  They really did.

If he was some kind of a monster, they wouldn’t have had the feelings that they had for him.

GLEN:  That’s right. And the wives wouldn’t have fallen in love with him, wanted to marry him, and wanted to have children with him. It’s a funny mix. When I think about it, my head just explodes. I think, “Jesus Christ, that would be too complicated!” It’s hard enough with one wife and the three children that I have. But people are wired differently. The context of the war years and how that affected people is really important. People did different things, when life was not so taken for granted and you lived in a very endangered situation, all the time, especially when you were living in a city that was getting bombed, on a nightly basis. Perhaps you have a desire to live life or generate life in those moments, I don’t know. There was no doubt that, to some degree, he was a fantasist, but it all got a bit gray around the edges. It’s definitely wrong. You shouldn’t marry somebody when you’re already married. There’s no doubt that’s wrong, and that’s not a good thing. That should probably not happen. And you definitely shouldn’t do it a third and fourth time. But all I had to do was make him somebody where you could understand why they fell in love with him. He was charismatic and exotic, and he was a man in uniform who wrote novels and was successful. I just tried to play that person, rather than having a judgment eye about him.

Did you read any of his novels?

GLEN:  I did, yeah. That was probably my only real significant research. I had the diary and the memoirs that had been written by Alison, and he wrote about 20 books, but I didn’t read them all. His famous ones were these Wallace mysteries, so I read those. In a way, the main character of the Wallace mysteries was a projection of himself, so that was quite revealing. He was the person that he would like to have been perceived as being, particularly from those that employed him, and then turned on him. It’s lovely when you can read the words written from the mind of the person that you’re playing. It just puts you as close as you’re gonna get.

By the time that you got to the last day of playing this character, do you feel like you had a different appreciation for who he was?

GLEN:  Yeah. I always really liked him, and I didn’t judge him. I think he gave a great deal. I know it’s fucked up. I don’t underestimate the wrong that he did. I really don’t. But he did give a great deal for his country, sacrificed his life, and tore himself apart to fight the cause for his country, and he tore himself domestically apart, as well. For whatever reason, he was treated poorly, in the end, and that gave me great sympathy for the man. If anything, I felt more sympathetic towards him, at the end of playing him, than when I started.

You were working on Game of Thrones when this came up. What’s it been like for you, as an actor, to be a part of a show that is one of the biggest, most popular, most epic shows, ever, and you’re one of the last men standing, of the original cast?

GLEN:  It’s been fantastic. I know. I did a head count, and there’s only between 12 or 15, who were in the pilot and every single season. There are not too many of us, which is good, and even less who were a part of every season, through this season. Some people have disappeared, and then reemerged. It’s been great. It’s been a really joyous journey. It’s now perceived as a massive, global hit, but I remember the days when we thought, “What the hell are we doing?!” We were half-way through the first season thinking, “Are we just making a pile of poo?” We had no idea, really. You need an objective response. And then, over the seasons, the belief and faith in it grew, and our faith in ourselves grew. It was probably half-way through Season 3 or 4 that we thought, “We’re actually onto something here.” It’s been an amazing journey to go on. And Dan [Weiss] and David [Benioff] are very, very lovely, cool showrunners, who made us all feel very valued and special.

As an actor, every job that you do, you give it your best shot, but you have no idea how it’s gonna get received. So, when you end up with something that is received incredibly well, is universally critically approved of, and is a massive commercial hit, then you better friggin’ enjoy it because it doesn’t get any better. The fact that it’s not just for a film that’s there and gone, but for a drama that’s kept coming back for almost a decade, it’s been a very special time, for us all. I’d say that it doesn’t matter what generation – whether it’s the young ones who came to it and made their name, or the people who’ve been around more, like myself – all of us individually look at each other and think, “We don’t fuckin’ believe it. This is crazy!” That sensation of feeling that we really lucked out is a nice thing because none of us go, “Yeah, we deserve this.”

It’s just amazing that it’s turned out as successful as it has, and that it’s transformed how people perceive us. I could whine about, “Why don’t people remember me when I did this at the Royal Shakespeare Company?,” but it’s okay. I don’t have a problem with that. I’m always really delightfully surprised when someone mentions a theater piece that they’ve seen me do because probably .001% of the people who watch Thrones went to see any theater show that I ever did. I always feel lucky, and it’s been nothing but a good thing.

Do you feel like this final season justifies the longer episode lengths?

GLEN:  I absolutely do. Could you have created two more episodes and have had them all the same length? Sure. But there are monumental waves to the different movements that happen during this last season, and it makes sense to me that they’re feature-length. The way people receive it has changed, as well. When you start something, you want to grab people’s attention and keep them, but then you get to a point where you’ve got people’s attention. You can allow yourself longer movement within the course of an episode, to get from your beginning to your end, in each wave of the changing drama. The whole production has real faith in itself, so it feels right to me.

Were you given scripts for the whole season, or were you just given your pieces?

GLEN:  No, we always got the scripts. That was true, from the word go. The only thing that was usual about it, this time, was that we all gathered together to read the entire season, before we began. That was very emotional and amazing. We were all around this massive table, with all of the various directors for the season. It was a very special time. If they’re to be believed, some people said that they were reading it for the first time, and didn’t know where the story was going. Kit Harrington always said that, and I think I believe him. I don’t know. We’d only had a few days to look at it, but it was Dan and David’s way of saying, “Here we go, we’re all in this together. This is the story that we’re telling.” It’s such a big production, and we all go off in various directions, so it was nice to gather everyone in one place, to begin with. We’ve kept people waiting, and I thank people for their patience, but I hope it’ll make sense, when people see it, that it took a bit of time to get it right.

The conclusion of Mrs. Wilson airs on Masterpiece on PBS on April 7^th.

– Christina Radish

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Game of Thrones is coming. And as the world’s most popular TV show gears up for its fiery finale, Iain Glen – aka Ser Jorah Mormont – explains what life in Westeros is really like. ‘Tits and dragons’ and all…

Iain Glen has played a lot of memorable roles in the past three and a half decades. Those with short memories may think of him as the charming bigamist Alec Wilson in last year’s Mrs Wilson on BBC One; others will know him as the ruthless publisher Sir Richard Carlisle in Downton Abbey, while those with perfect recall might remind him of his award-nominated Henry V for the RSC in the 1990s. But chances are, when he’s approached in the street these days, it’s by someone who wants a selfie with Ser Jorah Mormont from Game of Thrones.

The HBO series, which airs on Sky Atlantic in the UK, is the world’s most popular TV show, with upwards of 30 million viewers and fans worldwide, including in the Far East, India and South America. Excitement about the imminent final season has been building ever since the season seven finale in August 2017, and is now reaching boiling point.

One abiding memory of Glen will be from the last season, when Jorah, infected with the slow-creeping but deadly greyscale, bites down on a leather strap as the thick, scaly layer that covers his torso is cut away piece by piece with a scalpel. It may not have been his most nuanced performance but the agony on his face made it impossible to look away.

‘I was pretty spaced out,’ he tells me. The prosthetic took eight hours to apply – it had underlayers that would ooze pus and blood as it was sawn off – so Glen had to be on the filming br at 11pm, have make-up applied all night and then shoot a 12-hour day. ‘After what it required, the acting became quite easy,’ he says.

We’re in a photographic studio near the Thames. Glen biked here from his home in south London. ‘I’m addicted to cycling,’ he says. He will even cycle to red-carpet events and park his bike around the corner. ‘I find it a very sterile atmosphere being in the back of a limo… and [cycling] is quicker. I duck and dive, and I’m not somebody who will wait endlessly at a red traffic light.  I go up one-way streets the wrong way, too.’

He looks fit and lightly tanned. He was at home in Dulwich, where he lives with his partner, actor Charlotte Emmerson, and their two children, Mary, 11, and Juliet, six, when the scripts for the final season of Game of Thrones landed in September 2017.  

‘Security around the series has got more and more fierce,’ he says, ‘to the point where nothing was allowed on printed paper throughout the whole season.’ It could only be accessed online, with extensive security protocols – it wasn’t even allowed on the cast’s own devices.

‘There was a bit of resistance from actors to that,’ he adds, ‘particularly of an older generation.’ He performs a convincing harrumph – ‘“I need to look at my lines, how can I possibly…?”’ 

When he read the scripts, ‘I felt, “they’ve done it, they’ve pulled it off”,’ he says, ‘that balance of satiating people’s desire for things to be complete, but leaving enough questions in the air for people to try to project forward what world will follow, individually for all the characters and universally for the world that Thrones has occupied.’

Sadness at the end of ‘the best ride in the world’, after almost 10 years of the show, was tangible at the read-through of the series with all of the main cast in Belfast 10 days later.

‘There’s a real sense of loss, it’s like a family… there were lots of tears because it was coming to an end, but real excitement and joy that we were going to shoot it.’ As characters died within the story as they read, it felt to Glen and others as if they were really being lost. ‘We’ve all grown very close to each other.’

The filming would prove to be punishing. An enormous battle scene involving many of the key characters, pitched against the Night King’s invading Army of the Dead, was shot at the set of the fictional castle of Winterfell, in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. It took 11 weeks of night shoots in sub-freezing temperatures, enduring rain, mud, high winds and ‘sheep s—’. Glen has described it as ‘a real test, really miserable’.

The series has been shot in locations around the world, from the snowy wilderness of Iceland’s interior, to the desert shores of Morocco, castles in Spain and the walled city of Dubrovnik in Croatia. It used to be a running joke on set that whenever Glen flew in, it was to one of the sunshine destinations that everyone loved; but last season, he had to film an arduous trek through icefields to attempt to capture one of the undead. 

Young actors like Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) ‘are made’ by being in the show, Glen says. His storyline has been joined to Clarke’s almost from the start. What was their parting like in real life? ‘We’re friends and we’ll always be friends,’ he says.

‘Emilia went through an extraordinary story arc for herself as a person, and her character. I saw her as a nervous young actress, who had just got this big gig and everyone, [from] directors [down], was saying, “Is this the right actor? Is this how she should look? Does the wig look right?” It’s an incredible amount of pressure and I saw this young girl cope with it incredibly well.

‘She did ask for guidance and invariably I was saying, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Emilia’s very gifted, she really has no idea how good she is – she remains very vulnerable but it’s not a destructive vulnerability, it keeps her very focused… She’s [also] a very altruistic, warm person, who was the great generator of social life during Thrones. I’ll always keep an eye on what she’s doing and take pride in it.’

In the series, Ser Jorah is in love with Daenerys. Although Clarke’s character was aged up from the books for TV (in George RR Martin’s novels, she is in her early teens) fans have worked out that Daenerys can still only be 16 or 17 at the start of the show (Clarke was 22 at the time of the first season). ‘There was a point when it was definitely unrequited sexual love,’ Glen says, ‘but I think there’s always been a reciprocated love without the physicality.’

Given that Ser Jorah is in his mid-40s in the show and Glen is now 57, is his love for Daenerys age-appropriate? ‘You have to say that there’s a lot in Thrones that’s not “appropriate”,’ he returns, ‘but it feels plausible for a very different period.’

At the end of season one, Daenerys emerged from her husband’s funeral pyre unburnt and naked, with three newly hatched dragons. I wonder how Glen feels about former cast member Ian McShane’s contention that the show is ‘just tits and dragons’?

‘If tits and dragons is a negative, it doesn’t seem to stop it being a massive hit, does it?’ he says. He accepts that ‘there might have been a degree of HBO trying to arrest people’s attention, and you could accuse The Sopranos of doing that as well – there were tits and violence but there was a psychology that was underlying the whole thing.’

He thinks it might have been overstated in the first season of Thrones, in ‘putting everything on the line’ to establish the world, but says he has never felt concern about the many controversial scenes in the show, from sadistic sexual fantasies to rape. ‘At the end of the day, you can choose to watch or not to watch. When I look at history, at things that have taken place in real life that are just awful, I think there is room for dramas that try to depict that, so I’m not into censoring. I never felt things were gratuituous… Violence wise, it’s never bothered me.’

After filming their final scene, each of the main cast members was presented with a drawn storyboard from the making of the show. Glen’s depicted the bloody gladiatorial battle Jorah fought to win back Daenerys’s favour in season five. It was shot in the bullring of Osuna, in Andalusia, southern Spain, and had special memories for him.

His family were with him, and the director took his daughter Mary, then seven, into the make-up tent to get blood all over her face ‘so she looked like Daddy’, then had her shout ‘action’ and ‘cut’ for the scene. After the presentation speech by writers David Benioff and DB Weiss, Glen says he was in floods of tears.

Glen, who also has a son, Finlay, 22, from his first marriage to actor Susannah Harker, says he adores being a father. ‘I keep producing children… it imbues your life with a great amount of fun and magic and exhaustion. I have to be away working sometimes, and if I could I would have them with me all the time, because being woken up by a child, or having to wake up a child and deal with the minutiae and a lot of the boring crap, just having those eyes looking at you full of discovery… I love it.

‘I always think it’s a woman’s prerogative,’ he adds, ‘I think my lady is now done on the kids and that’s fine, but I would always have more.’ He breaks off to take a call from her.

As a boy himself, growing up in Edinburgh (he has two older brothers, Hamish and Graham) he was equal parts shy and extrovert, he says, and had no sense of danger. He would happily crawl out of a very high window and climb along gutters. His escapades saw him hospitalised a few times.

He was adept at pretending to fall over and hurt himself – ‘I could even do it for you now.’ He still has an earring in his left ear, which he pierced himself with a pin, aged 12. ‘Dad refused to take me to the golf club unless I took it out. I thought, “F— it, I’m not going then. No.”’

His investment banker father paid for him to attend the independent Edinburgh Academy, but he had to stay on to try to improve his grades, then got the same ones again. He  managed to get into Aberdeen University to study Russian, where he discovered the joy of drama and dropped out to go to Rada. He studied alongside Ralph Fiennes, Jane Horrocks, Imogen Stubbs and Jason Watkins, but still walked away with the top acting prize for his year, the Bancroft Gold Medal,  previously won by the likes of Mark Rylance, Fiona Shaw and Kenneth Branagh.

Glen built an acclaimed stage career alongside early TV roles, but has always managed to mix blockbuster  paydays – for films such as Tomb Raider (2001) and the  Resident Evil franchise – with more personal work. As Thrones’ popularity has grown, salaries have risen exponentially, with the top-end cast paid a reported $500,000 per episode (around £380,000). He notes that it’s a flat fee for a season, however many episodes you’re in. Have the rewards felt life-changing? ‘No, not really,’ he says. ‘I’ve always been lucky and busy as an actor.’

Glen experienced the negative side of press attention when his first marriage broke up in the early 2000s. Some of it was ‘intrusive’, he says – questions that related to the fact that he ‘sailed close to another relationship, which was [that of] Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. I did a two-handed play with Nicole, which was about a sexual relationship.’ 

The play was David Hare’s adaption of La Ronde, The Blue Room, which famously featured Kidman’s nude bottom and Glen performing naked cartwheels. It led, perhaps inevitably, to tabloid rumours of an affair between Glen and Kidman, whose marriage ended around the same time. Glen has always denied it, but it ensured that his separation from Harker was played out in public.

‘Compared to what some people have to deal with, it was fine,’ he says. ‘But you have a lot of eyes on you and pressure on you, when you just want to deal with your own private life.’

There’s generally no other downside to fame, he notes (‘My wife says it’s like getting your bottom patted every day’), although he will politely refuse to pose for selfies if he is with his family. Game of Thrones’ vast, global appeal means that he was once even surrounded by fans while visiting a township in South Africa.

It may take a while for the fervour around his current employment to die down, but Glen has other projects in the pipeline. He will be appearing alongside another of Thrones’  stars, Lena Headey, who plays Cersei Lannister, in an upcoming UK immigration drama The Flood, and has also filmed a sci-fi epic Haven: Above Sky, about a global catastrophe.

Whether he makes it to the final episode of Game of Thrones alive remains to be seen.

Season eight begins on Monday 15 April on Sky Atlantic on Sky Atlantic.

– Interview with Chris Harvey.

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