Game Of Thrones hasn’t always been great with guest appearances. Though it did alright with all those barely noticeable musicians over the years, any sense of restraint was thrown out the window when Ed Sheeran, one of the world’s most recognizable pop stars, made a jarring cameo as a Lannister soldier last season. Luckily, the show seems to be back on track, its premiere showing how to make guests fit naturally into its fiction by casting It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s Rob McElhenney and Silicon Valley/Freaks And Geeks’ Martin Starr as two Greyjoys who are swiftly, horribly murdered.
A clip from the episode shows both actors performing the roles of a lifetime. McElhenney, somehow looking grubbier than Mac ever has on Philadelphia, is easier to spot for the few seconds he gets to look stunned as an arrow bursts through the back of his head and out the front of his eye. Starr is tougher to notice, but no less impressive in his work as “the next guy who gets murdered by an arrow to the face.”
Thrones’ co-creators and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have a history with McElhenney, having written an episode of Philadelphia years ago and appearing, later, to take on the similarly essential guest roles of Bored Lifeguards #1 and #2 in “The Gang Goes To A Water Park.”