High drama

After spy thriller Deep State, Joe Dempsie is preparing for the final episodes of Game of Thrones, he tells Janet Christie

There’s a torture scene in Joe Dempsie’s new TV spy thriller Deep

State where pliers are produced to remove fingernails to make someone talk. I’m reminded of this when I start interrogating him on the final season of the forthcoming Game of Thrones in which Dempsie plays Gendry, AKA Robert Baratheon’s bastard son and heir to the Iron Throne if you’re a big Thronie. He’s on a break at his home in London before heading back to Belfast to wrap the final scenes of the finale when we speak, “just having a week at home, catching up with people you haven’t seen for ages, washing pants. The lack of glamour is staggering,” he laughs. So can he give us a hint about how it all ends? “Absolutely not.” Aw go on, tell us what happens to Gendry. Will he be wielding the Baratheon hammer? Will he end up on the Iron Throne?

No chance. Dempsie has just played an MI6 agent, and even if he hadn’t, he’s been working on Game of

Thrones long enough to be an expert at keeping secrets.

“It becomes second nature,” he says. “You become adept at talking about it without giving anything away. It’s fun, a challenge to keep everything under wraps. Walking around with the final episode of the last ever Game

of Thrones in your head is like being privy to a massive state secret, and most of the actors in Thrones are probably MI6 level now in terms of keeping secrets.”

The reference is entirely appropriate for Dempsie, as he plays an MI6 agent, Harry Clarke, opposite

Mark Strong and Karima Mcadams, in FOX UK’S eight part Deep State. After kicking off with a bang it’s now racing along in Bourne, Homeland,

Night Manager style with locations like Tehran and Beirut, and has already been commissioned for a second series. It’s a step up in terms of screen time for Dempsie, whose career is going great guns.

After making his name as the guy a generation of teenagers wanted to have on speed dial as party animal Chris in Skins, the controversial cult show everyone watched from 2007-13 Dempsie appeared in Shane Meadows’ cult series This is England

‘86, Southcliffe, Doctor Who, and then the global phenomenon that is HBO’S

Game of Thrones. It was between seasons seven and eight of the latter that he headed out to Casablanca to film Deep State, with very little notice or time to prepare.

“I was filming before I knew it and in hindsight that was a good thing because it’s such a complex, twisting narrative that I just had to go in there with a bit of tunnel vision. There are so many elements to playing Harry; the technical side of playing an MI6 agent, the practical things like having to do scenes in Farsi and Arabic, so I just flung myself into it headfirst.

“Being out in Morocco was an amazing experience too. Casablanca is such a vibrant city that never stops and it’s the Hollywood of the Middle East with everything in place to shoot movies, so it’s a great place to go,” he says, full of enthusiasm, before sounding a sombre note, “although it’s unfortunate we are making so much film and TV that requires Middle Eastern locations purely