{"id":3380,"date":"2009-09-23T16:36:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-23T16:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/?p=3380"},"modified":"2017-09-22T14:20:32","modified_gmt":"2017-09-22T14:20:32","slug":"as-sandor-clegane-the-hound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/2009\/09\/23\/as-sandor-clegane-the-hound\/","title":{"rendered":"As Sandor Clegane, the Hound&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; yes, it&#8217;s Rory McCann, a wonderful Scots actor.<\/p>\n<p>Most of you figured that out weeks ago, of course.  Mea culpa.  My clues were much too obvious this time around, especially the spelling of &#8220;porage,&#8221; which yielded up the secret to anyone who googled the word.  If I had gone with &#8220;porridge,&#8221; that might have created a few more hours of mystery at least.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the Scotts Porage Oats commercial from which the clue was taken:<br \/>&lt;lj-embed id=&#8221;13&#8243;\/&gt;<\/p>\n<p>As for my second clue, &#8220;the dog is green,&#8221; well, that one was pretty easy to find as well, once you found McCann&#8217;s name from the &#8220;porage&#8221; reference:<\/p>\n<p>&lt;lj-embed id=&#8221;14&#8243;\/&gt;<\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t either of those that won Rory the role, however.  Nor was it his performance in HOT FUZZ, a movie that I&#8217;ve heard good things about but never seen.  His look had a lot to do with it, though.  A lot of good actors auditioned for the role, and several gave really first class readings&#8230; but simply did not have the physicality the part demands.  Sandor needs to be a big guy, powerful and threatening, someone who looks like he could break you in half.  Rory is all of that and more.  <\/p>\n<p>Mostly, though, it was his readings.  We had other good ones, yes, but none to touch his.  One of the scenes in the side was Sandor&#8217;s scene with Sansa, where he tells her how his face came to be scarred.  In the space of a few lines, Rory had me terrified (where he roars, &#8220;Look at me,&#8221; and makes her look at his face), made me chuckle (when he says no, the burns weren&#8217;t dragonflame), and brought a tear to my eye (when he tells his story).  After I saw that, I knew he was Sandor&#8230; and David, Dan, and Tom all agreed.  <\/p>\n<p>I think you&#8217;ll going to love him as the Hound.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, if we go to series, now we&#8217;re going to have to find someone a foot and a half taller to play his brother.  Now THAT will be difficult! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; yes, it&#8217;s Rory McCann, a wonderful Scots actor. Most of you figured that out weeks ago, of course. Mea culpa. My clues were much too obvious this time around, especially the spelling of &#8220;porage,&#8221; which yielded up the secret to anyone who googled the word. If I had gone with &#8220;porridge,&#8221; that might have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[256,15],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3380"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3381,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3380\/revisions\/3381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}