Game changer

The third season of Game Of Thrones which aired last year established the blood-soaked fantasy drama as HBO's most popular show currently airing in the United States.

Its average viewership of 14.2 million viewers only just falls short of that of the HBO show often described as among the best American TV shows ever made: The Sopranos' fifth season achieved 14.4 million viewers on average.

Coincidentally, Game Of Thrones' creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had actually pitched the show as "The Sopranos in Middle Earth", drawing the narrative from A Song Of Ice And Fire, the ongoing series of best-selling fantasy novels by author George R.R. Martin.

But it is not just fantasy fanboys tuning in to the show, whose new fourth season premieres in Singapore on April 13 on HBO (StarHub TV Channel 601).

"Game Of Thrones is not a niche world, like the mafia," says Dutch actress Carice Van Houten, 37, who has played the bewitching priestess Melisandre since her debut in the second season.

"There's a whole range of people. Young kids have big roles and very old guys have big roles. The whole of society is represented."

Indeed, US viewing figures show that 44 per cent of the Season 3 audience was made up of women aged 18 and older, which defies the stereotype associating fantasy narratives with geeky teenage boys.

It helps that the women in the show are not mere scantily clad eye candy. In fact, the beautiful characters are often executed in Game Of Thrones, which only adds to its appeal. Even the fans of the books got a shock during the climax of the third season at the Red Wedding when Queen Talisa

Stark was stabbed, the steel piercing her pregnant belly.

"The women in this show are very dangerous, as they are in real life," laughs Irish actor Liam Cunningham, 52, who stars as the warrior Davos Seaworth.

"Seriously, Game Of Thrones is intelligent film-making. To write a drama like this for 25 regular characters who have their own storylines is not an easy thing to do.

"The bad guys aren't the bad guys and the good guys aren't the good guys, your empathy changes and that's very interesting and clever. As a viewer, my sympathies change a lot.

"I love the complexity. The characters are really interesting. I'm waiting for Davos to be told to massacre a creche of children. I did say that to the producers - too many people like my character, so he should probably start chopping up children."

The show debuted in the US in April 2011, with a narrative unfolding in the continent of Westeros. Martin distills his world from a blend of North European history and myth, borrowing from the post-Roman British dark ages, Icelandic saga and the murderous high intrigue of the late Middle Ages.

The uninitiated might think of it as the War of the Roses from 15th-century English history, with dragons and some magic thrown in for good measure.

Thus far, Martin has written five books in the series and the show could catch up with him. He is currently writing the sixth novel, The Winds Of Winter, and plans a seventh, A Dream Of Spring.

Recently, he said that the final chapters of the TV adaptation might require a movie-sized running time and budget to finish the job properly, as the books - and the dragons that feature therein - keep growing in size.

"It's so well-written and there are so many characters," says Scottish actor Rory McCann, 44, who plays a tough- as-nails warrior, Sandor Clegane, more commonly known as The Hound.

"You can pick a favourite and follow that one all the way through. The way it's written with all these cliff-hangers is so well done."

McCann's character spent a portion of last season travelling with Arya Stark, the artful young female character played by English teenager Maisie Williams.

Williams, 16, says: "People might not enjoy everything that's going on but there is something in there for everyone and that's why it's so popular.

"I also love the nuggets of comedy. Whenever things are getting very serious there's always a moment with some dark comedy that puts a different spin on things.

"But really, it shows how desperate people become for power, and the lengths that human beings will go to in order to get what they want."

This will become ever more apparent as the fourth season unfolds. It is set to correspond, roughly, with the second half of Martin's third book in the series, A Storm Of Swords.

"Because of the length of time we have, with several seasons of a TV show that's drawn from these books, you get to know the characters more," says Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, 43, who has played the enigmatic nobleman Jaime Lannister since the first season.

"The first thing you see of Jaimie is that he's horrible, sh**ging his sister and pushing a child out of a window. But we have no information, we only see the action. As time goes by, however, you see that there's more to him and that he's a more complex character."

Cunningham agrees, saying: "You go to the Hollywood roller-coaster comic book things and go, 'Okay, in the genre that was great.' You're not expecting it to have lots of complicated characters. But with something like this when it came along, it out-thought the audience.

"Barack Obama is a big fan of the show and I think it should be de rigueur for people who want to become politicians to see what it can do to the human psyche to have power and then the paranoia that accompanies it.

"It's about legacy and jealousy, and it's done with these incredibly complex characters. You simply couldn't do something like this in a movie. You'd not get that depth of character. It lends itself wonderfully to an expanded TV storytelling."

He adds: "It's just a brutal world. When in the first season Ned Stark got beheaded, that was a turning point in drama - especially in the United States when the leading man tends to prevail."

Lord Stark, played by Sean Bean, was the show's noble figurehead before his execution in the ninth episode of Season 1.

The character's death "is the quintessential Game Of Thrones moment, which set it up as a show that'd become infamous for slaughtering everyone's favourite characters", says Thomas Brodie-Sangster, 23, who plays Jojen Reed, a mystically inclined young man.

"As an actor, you don't know whether you'll make it through the season. And if the actors don't know and some of the directors don't know, it makes it even more enjoyable to watch. Even the big players don't know what's going to happen."

This adds a layer of authenticity to Game Of Thrones that is often absent from Hollywood movies.

At the end of the third season, for example, two more of the show's long-standing heroes - Ned Stark's wife, Catelyn, and his eldest son, Robb - meet a shocking fate during a treacherous incident known as the Red Wedding.

Actress Gwendoline Christie, who plays the honourable female sword- swinger Brienne of Tarth, got "quite upset" at the turn of events "even though I knew the Red Wedding was coming", as it was in the books.

That said, "the show does differ slightly from the books", says Van Houten. "You shouldn't get too attached to certain things that happen to your character in the books because they might not happen in the show, or they might happen to someone else instead.

"The first thing you say when you arrive on set is, 'Am I going to survive this?' In our world, often the good guys don't survive."

German actress Sibel Kekilli, 33, who plays Shae, the lover of main character Tyrion Lannister, puts it more bluntly: "At the start of each season I try and talk to George Martin, saying, 'I don't want to die.'"

WHAT'S IN STORE

Although the fourth season of Game Of Thrones runs roughly parallel with the second half of A Storm Of Swords, the third book in George R.R. Martin's ongoing fantasy series, the show's creators will no doubt make a few changes. With this in mind, some key cast members give their insights about what is in store for them in Season 4.

Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth)

"Brienne is in a situation where again she is not initiated. Who knows how King's Landing is going to respond to her, or how she'll find her place there, and how her relationship with Jaime will be in this new space?

What kind of man will he be now, will he go back to the man he was or will he be the good man he learnt to be with Brienne?"

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister)

"The Lannister family are together for the first time, really, in the whole show. Tyrion, Jaime and Cersei haven't seen one another for a long time and then there's Joffrey; the family dynamics show there's a lot of tension coming.

"Then, of course, Jaime comes back having lost his hand and is now the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. The new season starts a couple of weeks after Season 3 and his father has a lot of expectations, his brother needs a lot of help and he has to deal with the fact that he's no longer what he was."

Maisie Williams (Arya Stark)

"Arya sees herself stuck with The Hound for the foreseeable future, so instead of going out of her way to upset him, they begin to get on better.

"They learn to respect each other and learn that they have a lot of similarities; she feels that she can learn something from him as well. The whole of Westeros can learn something from him. She can learn from his brutality."

Isaac Hempstead-Wright (Bran Stark)

"For the first two seasons, Bran was very much sitting around waiting for things to happen. At the beginning, he wanted to be a knight, like Ned Stark, but when he lost his legs, he was at a loss. He wanted to be dead. There was nothing for him.

"Now he has got this whole supernatural thing pulling him forward. Even though he'd love to find his sisters or his brothers, he now knows what he wants to do and is finally chasing his own storyline. Bran starts to see a bit of action in Season 3 and hopefully there will be more in Season 4."

Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth)

"In the run of the last two seasons, they've been building up to Blackwater and the Red Wedding, but in this season, the climaxes come early. It's not a slow builder. It's bigger and bolder and monumental things happen early on."

Rory McCann (The Hound)

"His journey with Arya is a bit like survival in a war-torn country. Arya is the meal-ticket for The Hound. What happened in Season 3 didn't work out, so they have a new path and there's a lot of danger.

"You'll also see the relationship change a little bit too, with the things they've learnt from each other. The Hound is going to open up more; you're going to find out what makes him tick."

Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.