He is 40 years into a prolific screen acting career, but the job is still giving Iain Glen new things to learn and new sorts of characters to play.
In his latest, he had to have surfing lessons, a new skill to add to the resume alongside all the sword-fighting and horse-riding he clocked up being one of the longest-running characters in eight seasons of Game of Thrones. As well as getting the Scottish actor on a longboard, the Australian miniseries Last Days of the Space Age marks another first for the 63-year-old Glen – the first time he’s played a grandfather.
“I feel okay about it,” he says with a laugh about his generational elevation, via Zoom from the home in London where he and his wife are still raising two school-age kids. “When I read it, it was described as kind of a Jeff Bridges surfer dude, hanging out, smoking pot, surfing, living in a caravan on a beach. And I thought, ‘Well, what’s not to like?’ So no, the age thing didn’t bother me.”
Neither did the surfing. “The whole job for me was characterised by learning how to surf. You do see me on that board. Definitely, there’s a stunt man doing some stuff, but they got me on the board, and I spent my entire time when I wasn’t filming going to Manly and learning how to surf.”
Although Glen was hitting the beaches in Sydney, where much of Space Age was filmed, the show is set on the other side of the continent in Perth. It’s also set in 1979, a year in which Skylab crashed to Earth in Western Australia and the Miss Universe contest was being held in the WA capital.
The series is centred on three families, all with restless teenagers, living in a cul-de-sac in a Perth beach suburb. Glenn plays grandad Bob, the widowed Scottish migrant father to Judy (Radha Mitchell) who, with husband Tony (Jesse Spencer) has two daughters – Tilly, who is determined to have a career with Nasa, and Mia who would rather go surfing with Grandpa.
It’s a coming-of-age drama and a suburban period saga created by Brit-Aussie screenwriter David Chidlow, steered by veteran Australian directors including Kriv Stenders and Rachel Ward, and made for streamer Disney+ as its latest chunk of Australian content.
“But it feels very British to me as well. It’s a very, it’s an un-genre piece … a family drama taking place in a very fast-changing world, and in some ways, the internal conflicts within the families are mirrored by that external world. It’s a clever piece.
“It’s set, like, 45 years ago, but it feels like an entirely different world, an entirely different culture, and people’s preoccupations, their hopes, their aspirations, their fears, feel so different than they do now. I think a lot of people, including me, feel a little disoriented by the age we’re living in, and I don’t think I felt as disoriented then … or maybe I did.”
Glen says he can’t remember too much specific to that year from his own life, but he would have been between high school in Edinburgh and university in Aberdeen, before eventually heading to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) in London, where he graduated in 1985 with his sights set on the theatre.
“But within a year of leaving, I’d done a whole bunch of film stuff, and I’d done no theatre whatsoever.”
As his screen career blossomed in the UK, so did his stage one in the 1990s and early 2000s, in roles ranging from Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Company to the infamous “theatrical Viagra” of The Blue Room, opposite Nicole Kidman and directed by Sam Mendes. These days, Glen finds theatre seasons hard to fit into his professional and family life.
“It’s a thing where I think part of you just wants to be paid better and allow you more periods where you can be totally liberated at home with your family. Theatre will take you away, and it always hovers. You can never quite shake it off. Even if you’ve got a performance in the evening, you live with it in a way.”
But the film and television roles kept coming, and from all over. In the mid-2000s, Glen came to New Zealand to film Kidnapped, a new version of the Robert Louis Stevenson story for the BBC, which got some stick in Scotland for not being filmed there. He’s just back from India after his first foray to Bollywood.
Since 2021, he’s starred as a very bad man in two seasons of the South African crime thriller Reyka. Space Age is his second Australian adventure after Cleverman, the supernatural series from 2016-17 inspired by Aboriginal Dreamtime stories.
But from the outside, it might appear there are three distinct chapters in Glen’s acting career – the time before Game of Thrones, the time during the landmark fantasy series and the period since. He featured in all of GOT’s eight seasons as Ser Jorah Mormont, spy turned faithful protector of Daenerys Targaryen, in whose arms he died.
Glen was among a squad of seasoned British actors brought on to the show at the beginning. Appearing in 53 episodes, he outlasted them all.
“The recognition was totally transformative,” he says of the attention that came with the role, though not as much as it was for the show’s younger stars.
“A bunch of younger actors went from nowhere to being pretty much set for a healthy career. That wasn’t the case for me and others who were maybe in our 40s and 50s when we started. We had had good careers, and we’d been, you know, lucky to do a variety of stuff
“When something like Game of Thrones comes along when you are in your 40s, it’s just a great sustainer. I just shot a film in India and five seconds off the airplane and someone’s asking you for a selfie.
“The main thing about success for me is choice. I don’t have the most choice of any actor in the world by any means, but I’ve got enough choice for me to be satiated in this acting thing that I’ve been lucky enough to stumble into.”
Last Days of the Space Age is on Disney+ from October 2.
