Iain Glen has played Ser Jorah Mormont on Game of Thrones since the very first episode of the very first season. His character has spent much of that time pining for his boss Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), who’s locked him firmly in the friendzone. “There was a point when it was definitely unrequited sexual love,” Glen told The Telegraph. “[B]ut I think there’s always been a reciprocated love without the physicality.”

Speaking of Clarke, saying goodbye to his Khaleesi once filming was finished forever was difficult. “We’re friends and we’ll always be friends.”

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.

All that and she was having brain surgeries at the time. In any case, she could always turn to older actors like Glen for advice. “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.

Jorah has been through the wringer over the course of the show’s seven seasons…spying on Dany, falling in love with her, being banished, getting greyscale…In that last case, the cure was worse than the disease, as we all remember from season 7:

The actual greyscale prosthetic took eight hours to apply, which meant he had to be on set at 11:00 p.m. the night before his scene, and then he would film for 12 hours. “I was pretty spaced out,” he said. “After what it required, the acting became quite easy.”

Another memorable scene for Jorah came in season 5, when he fought in Daznak’s Pit to win back Daenerys’ trust. As we’ve heard, on their last day of filming, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss gave each actor a storyboard of their favorite scene with the character. For Glen, it was Jorah’s fight at Daznak’s Pit. After Benioff and Weiss gave a speech about Glen on set, he “was in floods of tears.”

Glen also talks about receiving his season 8 scripts and then part in the final table read with his castmates. Each time a character would die during the read, the feels were real. “There’s a real sense of loss, it’s like a family,” Glen said. “[T]here were lots of tears because it was coming to an end, but real excitement and joy that we were going to shoot it. We’ve all grown very close to each other.”

And how does Glen feel about the way Benioff and Weiss chose to close out the story of Game of Thrones?

[When I read the scripts] I felt, “they’ve done it, they’ve pulled it off.” 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.

It sounds like the series finale won’t tie up every single loose end, which personally I’m al for; let the discussion continue for years after it’s over.

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Game of Thrones season 8 premieres on April 14.

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