The Warrior
Game of Thrones
JOE DEMPSIE
Game of Thrones enters its eighth and final season this year as the most popular television show on the planet. And arguably the greatest dramatic event in the medium’s history. Certainly its sheer scale of production would justify that statement alone. With a size of cast and scale of set construction that could easily match that of a Hollywood manifestation . While the sheer audience numbers it has generated – as reported in Time magazine, an average of 23 million people watched each episode of season 7 in America alone – would make it the king and queen of any box office records. Actually, most appropriately, because the show is the creation of Home Box Office (HBO), which since its arrival as a pay-per-view channel in 1972, has gradually upped the game of programme-making with a whole raft of high quality, innovative TV.
The Warrior
Game of Thrones
And right there in the middle of this extraordinary panorama is a young man from Nottingham called Joe Dempsie. Who as Gendry, is the only character to have appeared in series one, and who is there for the show’s finale. Which is pretty impressive stuff for someone who tells me that he had never really considered acting as a hobby, let alone a career, and was just “as sporty kid, not a big personality, really.”
Joe was actually born in 1987 in the North West city of Liverpool, but is very much a son of the East Midlands city once famed for its lace trade. Along with the likes of the fabled Robin Hood, designer Paul Smith, football manager Brian Clough, who managed Joe’s favourite team Nottingham Forest from the lower divisions of the English League all the way to European Cup glory. And celebrated television and film maker Shane Meadows, who was to become a real catalyst of Joe’s ambitions and development as an actor. Something which began, as he points out, rather more by accident than design.
“I have a younger sister who suffers from cerebral palsy”, he tells me. “And when you have a family member who is severely disabled, life changes. Just be necessity everything has to kind of revolve around them. Just making sure she’s got the best chance possible. So as a result, my parents were quite keen to ensure I wasn’t getting left out – that I was getting enough of their time.
“And (my mum) kind of heard me tell a friend of hers I was in to drama at school. And I think that really surprised her. But she had heard about this workshop and suggested I should go along and audition for it. And to my surprise, not the first time, but the second time I went back, and I got in.”
The Central Junior Television Workshop was formed in the Midlands in 1983 to create an outlet for local kids to learn the skills and hopefully go on to make a career of acting. And indeed it does have several former members who are well known names on UK TV. But for Joe, it was the “beautiful serendipity” of the fact that he was studying and learning drama while Shane Meadows – who had moved to Nottingham when he was twenty – had already started to develop his craft in the city as a writer and director. As well as finding and nurturing raw acting talent in the area.
“And there are times when you are shooting a scene. You can’t see a camera. You can’t see a sound man. You are just in that world.”
So for Joe, that “first acting-related ambition” he had expressed to his mum’s friend came as a result of seeing Meadow’s third film ‘A Room For Romeo Brass’ on TV. “It changed my life, really,” he reflects with not little awe in his voice. “ Not just because I knew people who were in it, but because they were people like me.”
For Joe, this led to the ideal scenario of him appearing alongside many of of those familiar-faced actors in Meadow’s breakthrough drama series ‘This Is England ‘86’, which concluded in 2010.
By which time, Dempsie had already compiled an impressive number of appearances in various programmes, before really establishing himself as a young star on the rise in two series of the cult teen comedy-drama ‘Skins’, which began in 2007.
And Joe considers himself to have been lucky that he was both learning his trade and making his way in the acting world at a time when “we told stories about regional, working class people.” Something that comes into sharp focus when we discuss him having played the infamous character – Nottingham working class hero Arthur Seaton – in a recent radio adaptation of the 1960 film ‘Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.’ That movie was at the forefront of what were known at the time as kitchen sink (ie working class) dramas and gave Albert Finney (the brilliant Manchester-born film and stage actor who died earlier this year aged 82) his first starring role.
“Finney was breaking the mould in many ways”, Joe reflects. “But he came at a time when as an industry and as a culture we really wanted to tell working class stories.
“To do that now, the identity and politics of it within the industry, are the interesting one for me. It really depends on who the gatekeepers are. And who the story tellers are. Like the conversation surrounding diversity, concerning race. It starts with the writers, if you want more faces of colour telling stories from their perspective. And it’s no different when it comes to class. With rents and fees in the major cities like London, it does make the arts more exclusive. And we need to find a way to counter balance that.”
Nevertheless, as Joe goes on to point out, these can be exciting times to be making your way in the acting world. And with Games of Thrones, along with his other current TV series – (performing with celebrated London-born actor Mark Strong in a series created for US cable station Epix) ‘Deep State’, he is experiencing his career just about as broadly as it can get.
“They are two interesting examples – the double-edged sword of it”, he says. “You’ve got Game Of Thrones, which I think will be seen in hindsight as the moment TV went blockbuster. The show that pushed the boundaries of what’s possible. It’s without borders.
“So, yes, there are more parts on offer, because there are more platforms, so more things can be produced. But that has made it harder for a show to break through. Which is the interesting challenge with ‘Deep State’. The channel wants it to be the show that makes people (in the US) say, ‘ooh I must get Epix’.
“There’s so much great telly work but you’ve got to be really, really good to make people elect to watch your bit.”
What is not in doubt that people – lots and LOTS of people – will be watching the bit of Joe’s career that has been playing out for nearly ten years in the fantasy world of the Seven Kingdoms. And for a young actor at the start of his journey. Whose only previous career path was “to be a sports journalist. All I wanted back then was to devise a way I could get paid to watch football.
For Joe, the whole thing “has been such a mad trip. You watch so many movies now, you almost assume everything is CGI. Then you get over to Belfast (in Northern Ireland, where the production takes place) and you realise ‘oh, they’ve just built Winterfell. They’ve just BUILT it. It’s THERE!
