‘People think I’m an aristocrat’: Charles Dance on class, Game of Thrones – and avoiding James Bond

Charles Dance … ‘We used to talk about the smell of the greasepaint, but the smell of a film set – there’s nothing like it.’ Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

I meet Charles Dance in a cute French bistro on Islington Green, north London. He is 76 and has one of those faces that holds its adamantine shape, although its seriousness is offset by his easy, expansive manner, the relaxed confidence and ready laugh of a person who is “doing this fantastic job that I’ve been all over the world with. I get paid pretty well. Something has to be really bad for me to turn it down, otherwise I keep on doing it.”

The restaurant staff love him. The waiter tells me afterwards that he was the second Lannister in that day (Dance played the family’s patriarch in Game of Thrones). Naturally, I ask who the other one was: “I couldn’t possibly tell you.”