Game of Thrones star Ian McElhinney lands in Aussie crime drama High Country

He loves his life of acting but Ian McElhinney hated his shock death in Game of Thrones.

Ian McElhinney in the setting for High Country in Victoria’s bushland.

Ian McElhinney was more than a little put out when his character was written out of Game of Thrones. For 25 episodes over five seasons of the Emmy-winning fantasy epic, the veteran Northern Irish actor played Ser Barristan Selmy, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard and one of the finest swordsmen in the Seven Kingdoms.

That is, until he came to a sticky end in the defence of would-be queen and Mother of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen, ambushed and hacked to death at the hands of her enemies. No surprises there – significant characters in the famously bloody and predictable cultural phenomenon got bumped off unexpectedly all the time.

But McElhinney’s beef was that Barristan the Bold was – and is – well and truly alive in George R.R. Martin’s source material books and he says that show-runners David Benioff and Dan Weiss missed a trick by not keeping him that way.

Relaxing over lunch on set in suburban Melbourne, between filming scenes for new Binge crime drama High Country, he seems philosophical about it. At the time though, he was pretty ticked off – and wasn’t afraid to say so.

“I was upset at the time, but I have to get over it,” he says between mouthfuls of brisket and salad.

“Because I’d read the books, I’d always been looking forward to season 5, and I thought, ‘Oh, come on, any good things that might happen for this character, you have taken them away from me’,” he says. “I did feel resentful and I let it be known, but at the end of the day they make whatever decisions they are going to make and you just have to live with them.”

McElhinney in a scene from Games of Thrones.

McElhinney, like millions of other viewers around the world, admits to being rather underwhelmed by how Game of Thrones ended and thinks the complex plot strands and character arcs could have been better tied up with two full length seasons, rather than the truncated ones that left many feeling short-changed.

“The end didn’t really fulfil the promise of what had been done before because before it had really been a very, very well-wrought series,” he says. “The audience had gotten invested in a whole range of characters – not just the core ones – and wanted to see what happened with all of these characters, so I feel that for the sake of the audience and actually, funnily enough, for the sake of quite a lot of the actors, they wanted a richer, better, or more fleshed out conclusion, and you didn’t get that.

“It all ultimately felt a bit rushed and I think the audience were disappointed, and I think quite a few of the actors were too.”

All told though, with the benefit of a decade of hindsight, McElhinney’s experiences on Game of Thrones, which shot its first season in his home town of Belfast, are overwhelmingly positive. After initially working as a teacher, McElhinney started his acting career relatively late in life, at age 30, playing Bill Sykes in a theatre production of Oliver!

But after decades of solidly working on the stage and in television in the UK, landing roles in staples such as The Bill, Taggart and Hornblower, the now 75-year-old still seems slightly astonished and very grateful at the late-career turbo charge that Game of Thrones has given him.

“Game of Thrones was a bit of a gamechanger,” he said. “Many actors are in the business of working away quite steadily all their lives and 99 per cent of the world knows nothing about them.

“The difference now with something like Game of Thrones and certainly the nature of streaming is that you can be doing something very particular, and particular to your part of the world, and before you know it, it’s got out there somewhere else and is being seen around the world.”

Since the global success of GOT boosted his profile to new heights, McElhinney has appeared in homegrown Northern Ireland hits such as The Fall and Derry Girls, as well as joining beloved pop culture franchises including Star Wars, Doctor Who and the Superman-adjacent sci-fi drama Krypton. As someone who admits not particularly caring for either fantasy or science fiction, and has been intimately involved with the stage as an actor, writer and director for decades, the fact that his highest profile gigs have been in that sphere is downright “bizarre”.

“Because I have done a lot of theatre in my time, and spent a lot of my time doing what you’d call – for want of a better word – domestic dramas, if you’d said to me 20 years ago, ‘actually, you’re probably going to be busier in your 60s than you’ve been prior to it, and actually you’re probably going to be doing a lot of sci-fi/fantasy’, I would have said don’t be ridiculous,” he says with a laugh.

Certainly, the creators of High Country knew McElhinney from Game of Thrones and once co-writer John Ridley had decided he wanted a pivotal character of country cop Sam Dyson in the crime drama to be Irish, his was the name that sprung to mind.

“Weirdly, he was always Irish, this character,” says Ridley, who was also one of the writers of the internationally successful Aussie prison drama Wentworth, along with his High Country co-creator Marcia Gardner. “There was something about the Celtic warmth and humanity that always attracted us to the notion of, ‘Oh well, this character is someone who is Irish’. And also, we wanted Sam to be a bit of an outsider.”

Shot in and around the northeastern Victorian town of Jamieson, renamed Brokenridge for the show, High Country is partly inspired by a spate of real-life disappearances in the rugged and remote region. AACTA-winning writer and actor Leah Purcell plays the lead role of Andrea Whitford, a city cop who has moved to the bush to replace McElhinney’s retiring small-town sergeant Dyson, just in time to find herself in the middle of multiple murder and missing person cases.

McElhinney with High Country co-star Leah Purcell.

Although he’d visited Australia six years ago when his son was based in Sydney, McElhinney says he was astonished to discover a part of the country that was so densely forested and wild as to become almost impenetrable. The sense of danger, mystery and menace of the landscape, he says, becomes a key part of the drama, as his character becomes dangerously obsessed with a murder case he couldn’t solve while in office.

“A lot of us who live elsewhere think of the Outback and that’s a red desert or whatever,” he says. “We’re in a really lush, deeply, densely forested part of the country. I have been up there and the ground does slip away pretty dramatically so once you enter into that bush, God knows where you are going – you could be dropping 100 feet before you know it. It’s very gripping – and unnerving – for viewers because there is something strange going on but you don’t quite know what is responsible for it, whether it’s an individual or something strange to do with this place that we are all in, the High Country. There’s definitely an air of mystery and an air of danger and uncertainty, which makes it exciting as project.”

Aaron Pederson, Leah Purcell and Sarah Wiseman. Picture: David Smith.

The High Country cast also includes homegrown talent such as Sarah Wiseman, Aaron Pederson, Henry Nixon, Linda Cropper and Leah Vandenberg, but McElhinney is particularly effusive in his praise for Purcell, with whom he shares most of his scenes as the two characters start off as allies but later butt heads as the murder mysteries begin to unravel.

And while McElhinney says he enjoyed a manageable schedule that avoided the worst of the elements as the shoot moved to Mt Buller and the dense bushland around Jamieson and Mansfield, Purcell is in just about every scene, as well as being an executive producer and cultural adviser.

“She’s very easy to work with, very positive and up for everything,” says McElhinney of his co-star.

“God bless her, she’s got a very tough time on this in that it’s a very heavy schedule for her.”

Despite finding the time to explore the city during the Melbourne-based part of the shoot, travelling around by tram and walking the St Kilda promenade (“it’s a very attractive city and very negotiable”), McElhinney says he struggled to get his head around the local football code. Even having grown up in Belfast with Gaelic football, Aussie Rules’ closest cousin, he says he failed to make head or tail of the annual Anzac Day blockbuster between Essendon and Collingwood at the MCG.

“It’s mad,” he says with a laugh. “It’s such an unstructured game that sometimes you’re looking and you’re thinking this is like kids kicking a ball about. You know, ‘it’s mine, it’s mine, no it’s mine’. There’s a random sort of madness about it, which is actually great fun. But when you don’t understand all the rules, you’re sort of thinking, ‘Surely there’s a penalty there somewhere or surely somebody’s committed a foul of some kind’.”

With his Ser Barristan cred and post GOT forays into geek culture touchstones, McElhinney is at the stage where he could do the convention circuit for life. He has already had brushes with the extreme fandom and says he’s continually surprised at just how invested fans are in the franchises they love, likening it to the passion others find in sports teams.

“Very often you will be doing a Q&A in a Comic-Con context and you find yourself saying, ‘Look sorry, you guys know more than we do because you’re really into this – we simply turned up did the bits we were asked to do and disappeared’.”

Outside of that uniquely odd environment, these days he mostly gets recognised as Granda Joe from Derry Girls, but largely he just gets left alone, which suits him just fine.

“As long as somebody says, ‘Oh, there’s your man, he’s quite interesting’, then I am quite happy because I want to carry on working, thank you very much. I have been used for years to going out under the radar so I am very happy to stay that way.”

High Country streams on Binge from March 19.