Game Of Thrones Season 4: 10 Actors Who Knocked It Out The Park

4. Charles Dance €“ Tywin Lannister

In what's looking like a very Lannister-heavy list €“ hey, it can't be helped that their plotline is head-and-shoulders above the others €“Tywin had a slightly more laid-back season. Well, as laid-back as the Warden Of The West can get, anyhow. After unexpectedly plumbing the emotional depths in season two and chewing out his family at every opportunity in season three, the Lannister paterfamilias had little else to do but to preside over everything with his steely-eyed gaze. Mind you, if you needed an actor to preside over anything, your first choice would certainly be Charles Dance. Positively Shakespearean in his delivery, Dance's clearly enunciated, authoritarian tones were simply made for the part of Tywin, and he continued proving it this season. In a show with as varied a character roster as Game Of Thrones, to be feared by all is one hell of an achievement. yet in Dance's hands, that master-of-the-universe air was well and truly captured. Effortlessly batting off all comers with harsh logic and machinations, Tywin once again bestrode the King's Landing political scene like a colossus, and the performance made it all the more convincing. So obviously, it made it ever more shocking to see him so brutally wiped out of the game in the finale, and by the son he'd tormented all his life. Of course, his armour had been chinked beforehand €“ Cersei got the better of him by threatening to press the incest nuclear option €“ but to see him made into a pin-cushion on the privy was a shocking way to go. Yet even with his trousers down (figuratively and literally), Dance was still nothing if not magisterial €“ and that's not something you can say about every actor.