JACKSON: So is that when you got back to the place where you thought, “Maybe I need to do something else?”

CHRISTIE: I had long spells of unemployment. Before Game of Thrones, I only did theater work really. I had done lots of theater and I really wanted to do screen work. I said to my agent, “Look, I really want to do screen work and I want to concentrate on that now” and he said, “Well, it’s going to be tough for you.” Ten months went by without anything, with no auditions, nothing at all. Friends were saying to me, “Do you think you want to consider something else?” [But] that was never, never an option for me. I was almost aghast that they could think such a thing.I don’t know if you ever felt this way Sam because I think you always, always work.

JACKSON: Once you settle and you start doing something else to augment what you want to do, you end up doing that settle thing. So that was never an option for me. I built sets, I hung lights, I did all kinds of stuff to stay in a theatrical situation so when my audition time came, nobody was asking me, “Well, who’s going to wait my tables?” I never did any of that. I was always in the theater—I might have been backstage or up in the rafters somewhere, but I was there. Somebody would say, “Good luck,” not “When are you going to be back?”

CHRISTIE: Yeah, exactly.

JACKSON: Simon Callow, that’s your mentor? Why him?

CHRISTIE: It all came from when I was at drama school. We had to do a production week for the third years, so the end of each term the first years had to do something. I built stages and I did stage management—I think I built the sets twice, I happened to be good with a drill, which is a talent I didn’t know I had. But I got to do box office in first term, which meant doing the box office with the school secretary, who is a very educated, brilliant woman with a brilliant mind and she also had been an actress. I wanted to impress because I felt I had very little to offer. I lied and I said I loved filing and we had a whole conversation about that. About a month later she rang me—Simon Callow went to Drama Centre London—and she said “Simon Callow needs someone to file his 4,000 compact discs and I thought you’d be the perfect person to do that.” As it turned out, we lived around the corner from each other. So I organized his 4,000 compact discs—mainly classical, very esoteric. I’d always loved his work, loved his books, and I completely and utterly fell in love with him. I did a good job on the filing. He had two boxer dogs, and I grew up with a boxer dog, so I started being a dog walker as well. He got me to compile his autobiography. I just became kind of a fixture for the next eight years and he mentored me. He’d come and see me in absolutely everything I was in. He would give me very, very honest feedback and he would throw books at me and scream at me about my lazy and disorganized mind. He was a great inspiration and told me to be an artist and to never, ever, ever give up. I was hugely lucky because I admired him so greatly to have someone in my life who was successful, who had real integrity, who was telling me to be myself. He was one of the first actors to be open about his sexuality from the second his career started and he inspired me and taught me to be bold about who I am and not to apologize for myself. Through all those spells of ups and downs, to have someone of that caliber to be there, to say, “I believe in you,” that’s very rare.