The first major casualty of Game of Thrones season 5 offered his thoughts on that blazing exit.
Last night’s season premiere offered a shock to fans of both the HBO series and George R.R. Martin’s novels, when the powerful Mance Rayder meet his end on Melisandre’s pyre. Actor Ciarin Hinds, however, was less surprised.
“I had a feeling the end of Season 4… that I wasn’t going to be long for this world,” Hinds says. The arrival of Stannis Baratheon and Davos Seaworth suggested to him that the end might be nigh. “Those two guys were on a mission,” the actor says.
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Hinds’s suspicions were confirmed before the script went out, in an email from showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss. While he seems to have taken the news with equanimity, the actor admits that he doesn’t necessarily think that Mance made his final decision correctly.
Unlike most characters on Game of Thrones, Mance chose to give up his life rather than kneel to the self-proclaimed King Stannis. In a video from HBO, Hinds likens the decision to being “invited to your own barbecue and [accepting] the invitation.”
“I think nobody makes a right choice,” Hinds says. “That’s what I think this is about, is about people making choices. Are any of them right? Most of them are wrong.”
That said, Hinds understands his character’s fatal reasoning. “I think he genuinely believes or hopes for something greater — not particularly for himself, but for the people he represented,” the actor says. “I think he realized ahead what would happen to those people if he did bend the knee, and they would become subject yet again to someone else. I don’t think he was interested in that.
“Whatever his legacy was,” Hinds considers, “It was a man who was, I suppose, true to what he was, for better or worse.”
Hinds is also relaxed about the fact that Mance Rayder is still alive in Martin’s novels.
“I guess people might be miffed that you’re not following the books,” he allows, “But it’s not possible. No book can be translated word-for-word into a different medium.”
The translation from book to screen opens up exciting possibilities in Hinds’s opinion. “[Benioff and Weiss] have to keep kind of confounding people by what they might do and how bold they might be with it,” Hinds says. “They have to corral their episodes from the huge books. Anything could happen, I guess.”
Game of Thrones season 5, episode 2, “The House of Black and White,” airs on Sunday, April 19 at 9:00 p.m. on HBO.