15 Secondary Game Of Thrones Characters We Can’t Recognize Off Screen

2. Theon Greyjoy – Alfie Allen

Alfie Allen doesn’t look all that different from his character Theon Greyjoy, but he made this list because of the profound transformation he had to make to become Reek, Ramsay’s human pet/pincushion. He does a great job of portraying someone who doesn’t really fit the description of a hero but is also painfully sympathetic. No matter how you feel about Theon’s earlier actions in the show, it’s impossible to look at the person he eventually becomes and say that he deserves that. Allen did an interview with Mic talking about how he basically plays three characters at once and how much of an opportunity that was. “If you’d say to any actor, “You get to play three parts in one person, how do you feel about that?” I’m pretty sure they’d be ecstatic. It’s definitely always a challenge to find empathy — as a viewer, but also as an actor — for this character. It’s difficult, a lot of the time. To find that in myself, it’s really interesting, as an actor, to be able to explore that.”

1. Samwell Tarly – John Bradley

John Bradley might very well be playing the single nicest person in Westeros right now. Samwell Tarly might not be the in-universe heartthrob his best friend Jon Snow is, but he’s won the hearts of women everywhere regardless with his White Walker killing and his devotion to Gilly and their son Sam. Bradley has even said that Jon Snow might be even more handsome than the world thinks he is.“Seeing [Harington] on-screen is nice enough,” Bradley told Conan O’Brien at Comic-Con, “but it’s nothing compared to what I’m going to call the ‘live experience.’”

He’s another actor who’s been taking center stage in season 7,  thanks to his position as an intern maester in Oldtown, a previously unseen location. He looks the same as Sam, but somehow much cooler. The second episode shows Sam in a scene with Jorah Mormont in perhaps the grossest scene in the whole show’s history, which is really saying something. According to Bradley, it’s just as gross even when you know how it’s really done. “As I was pulling away at the prosthetic, they were pumping away and releasing more pus through the prosthetic. It looked disgusting on the day, too. It looks disgusting even when you know it’s latex and that there’s a man nearby with a bucket filled with creamy gunk. It looks so disgusting. You look down, and you genuinely believe in what it is … you can imagine that it’s pretty grim.”