Actor Charles Dance took the part of Tywin Lannister in Game Of Thrones because its script did not use the word “gotten”.
The veteran stage and screen actor said it made his skin crawl when scripts for period or “mythical period” TV or film dramas used modern language.
But Dance, 72, said he had been delighted by the show’s literary pedigree, citing its creators’ shared education at Trinity College, Dublin, as a main reason for the show’s huge success.
Speaking on BBC Radio 2’s Steve Wright in the Afternoon show, he said: “It’s the quality of the writing principally.
“Dan Weiss and David Benioff were both English graduates at Trinity Dublin, I believe. They are well schooled in the language.
“Because a lot of the time if I get a period script, even if it is a mythical period but it is supposed to be in England, and I read the word ‘gotten’ it makes the hairs go up on the back of my neck.
“There wasn’t a single ‘gotten’ in this at all.
“The whole thing was run like a military operation. At the beginning of a 10-part season, there were 10 scripts. Very few rewrites.
“There were two units working full time on that. It’s a major scheduling thing. It was fantastic.”
Dance played the patriarch of the Lannister family for the first four series of the epic on-screen saga until his character was killed off in 2015.
He recently admitted he was “confused” by the show’s denouement, telling Good Morning Britain: “It got to the very end and I thought, ‘Hmm, OK’.”