We Spoke To Kristian Nairn About Rave Of Thrones, Crying Fans And Hodor Hodor Hodor
He is actually quite lovely.
You know Kristian Nairn best as Game Of Thrones fan favourite and lovable giant Hodor, but when he’s not saving Bran from Roose Bolton’s henchmen or saying “Hodor”.
When he’s not doing that, though, Nairn likes to get on the decks and drop some sick beats — he’s been DJing in Ireland for over twenty years, and his newfound fame has seen demand for his services skyrocket.
Hence why he’s touring Australia at the moment for the Rave of Thrones tour, a Game Of Thrones-themed DJ extravaganza with Nairn as the headlining DJ, a boatload of GoT-themed nonsense and a crowd full of people who hopefully fall into the overlapping space on the Venn diagram combining “people who love Game Of Thrones” with “people who love deep house music”.
We spoke to Nairn ahead of the tour, and he’s fairly confident he can cook up a show that won’t have anyone feeling left out. “I know how to get people doing, even people who aren’t dance music fans. There’ll be a few original tracks in there as well, so I think the kind of stuff I play will go down well,” he said.
It’s been a busy few months for Nairn — he’s taking Rave of Thrones to New York in October — but he still isn’t used to being an unlikely celebrity. “I’m still in shock. I always believed something like this would happen, I just didn’t know how. I never really gave up trying, in various ways, but it was always for the love of the job — I love acting and I love DJing, and I don’t really give a shit about all the other stuff, to be honest,” he said.
One of the weirder sides of his unlikely prominence is in dealing with fans, especially when someone has a few too many Feelings. “Sometimes you get criers. It doesn’t happen very often, but there are definitely times when a fan just starts bawling a bit. I don’t mean to be impersonal, but when it happens you go ‘Really? It’s just me, it’s just us! We’re just normal people’. It scares me a wee bit.”
More often, though, coming across fans of the show can be a rewarding experience — Nairn went public about being gay back in March, and since then a fair number of LGBTI fans have expressed their appreciation for his willingness to be openly gay in the limelight. “It’s not talked about in the science fiction genre as much as and a lot of fans — they’re favourite show is Game Of Thrones, and they don’t see gay characters that often — really appreciate that. Hearing that it’s given people a bit of support and a bit of courage makes it very worthwhile.
“On a lighter note, a girl at London ComicCon came dressed as a female Hodor, a drag version of Hodor, and it was scarily good — it had the rabbit skins and everything, it was really impressive. When people like that put all this time and effort into this kind of stuff it makes you go ‘My God’, and you realise that somewhere out there you’re really affecting somebody,” he said.
“Stuff like that is why I’m keen to be back in Australia, and really looking forward to see the crowds that turn out.”
Hodor?
He concurs gravely. “Hodor.”
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Rave of Thrones is coming to the HiFi in Sydney on Thursday, August 28, and will be visiting Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Darwin and Perth. Click here for details and tickets.