An unofficial, unauthorized, half-abashed fan site about actor Rory McCann
Oh, how exciting! Rory got another voice job! If you were watching that DNA thing with Ancestry.com in the UK tonight, you heard him.
Just TYPICAL, though: this probably isn’t anything I’ll ever find on DVD. Dammit, big man… [shakes fist]
Nah, I’m playin’. (Okay, a little.) Always good to have a bit more of Rory’s voice out there in the world…
First off, wow, someone visited here from Marion, Ohio! I normally don’t talk about my visitor counter, though it’s never been a secret, because I don’t want to freak people out. I can’t see your name or address, I just see where in the world (city, state/province, country) you’re visiting from. I noticed Marion particularly because when I was homeless last year that’s where my rehousing caseworker with the Salvation Army kept trying to relocate me. I’ve even been there once to view an apartment. There’s a memorial in that town for former president Warren G. Harding — bet this is the first some of you have ever heard of him. I passed it on my left driving south on U.S. Highway 23 while I was there. Anyway. End of completely off-topic blather.
I also see someone hit here from Ayr. Howdy! Doubt it was the big man, but I like to think it could have been.
Okay. Just a few notes:
1. If you have a Google Alert set for Rory you may have noticed the obit. NO, Oor Rory is not dead. This was another Rory McCann born three years before the big man and it looks like he lived in England as well. Don’t SCARE me like that, Google. Jesus.
2. There has been a recent auction of Game of Thrones stuff. Mainly costumes and personal props such as Jon Snow’s Longclaw sword (awwww! I loved that thing!). But they also auctioned off one of Rory’s costumes. I don’t know which, but I know I did a search on this page and a couple things of his came up. Feel free to click around. And explore. And cry ’cause you can’t afford a single stitch of any of it. SOB.
(That link won’t stay good forever, I’d imagine. Better look while you can.)
3. If you like reaction videos, this is one-half of an adorable couple young enough to be my kids (well… not both at the same time… their surname’s not Targaryen) who typically do reactions to music videos and movies. It’s a lot of fun, or I think it is; it’s almost as good as knowing young people in person who I can introduce to everything I like. But anyway, Amber is currently watching our favorite series, and it is a real treat watching her experience all this for the first time. So if you like that sort of thing, enjoy.
Okay. Got schtuff to do and am hungry. Talk at ya later.
Oh hey, hi! I know it’s been a bit since I last updated. Honestly I need to quit doing these sorts of updates here, but I’m not gonna beat myself up too badly about it until I get this thing sorted out to where I wanted it to be in the first place. I’ve been procrastinating again. Bad Admin.
But! Someone messaged me recently on Instagram to ask me about Rory’s middle name. Because other people might be wondering, here’s my logic process with that whole subject.
Basically, no one’s got a source “proving” Rory’s middle name is Phillip (or Philip). I used to see it on Wikipedia but there was no source cited for it. And since I have seen it there, it’s been removed. If there were anything to back it up I feel like it would have been cited with a source and not edited out.
However, I did find a website that specializes in astrological birth charts for celebrities, and they claim they’ve seen his birth certificate. And they say his middle name is Frederick (and also that he was born in Paisley, which, I have had another fan inform me that he’s been sighted there, and perhaps he was visiting family?). I realize that’s not a much better source than Wikipedia since I don’t even know if I could acquire a copy of his birth certificate to follow up and verify, and I really don’t want to try to do that anyway because hello, creepy. But I feel like if they had incorrect information, maybe someone would have contacted them about it by now and they’d have corrected their information. But lo, here we are. If you want to try to contact them, be my guest. I’m moderately satisfied their information is accurate.
As to the other sorta-question I got from this person, about whether people have seen him in public with his wife? Yes. This has happened at several restaurants and pubs and even when they haven’t personally seen her, sometimes he mentions her in conversations with management or staff. What convinced me that accounts of his marital status are valid is that one pub he visited last year (two Januaries ago; quite memorably, it was soon after I went homeless and on the day after my birthday so that was one fuckarow of a week) told me by DM that he’d told them that his wife had set up his Instagram. I still have that conversation in my DMs, in fact, though I will not be telling you who the pub is. I recall that when he was in Portugal in 2020 and a restaurant owner there spoke of seeing him with his wife, the fangirls harassed the owner until he deleted his restaurant’s Instagram. That was a shitty thing to do to him. Marital status is public knowledge for a reason and it still wasn’t something worth ruining his social-media life over. So I am not going to facilitate that happening to anyone else. If you don’t want to take me at my word, I completely understand because you don’t know me from Eve. But you’re going to have to take me at my word, because that’s all you’re getting.
(Why was this pub talking with me via DM? I had said something in their comments and they were following up. And that conversation ended very abruptly so I suspect someone fussed at someone else behind the scenes like “Wait! Don’t tell her things!” It wouldn’t surprise me. But there you go.)
I still personally want to know if he was married yet when he went to Norway in 2019. Just an idle curiosity because it’s mostly none of my business. But — and I think I’ve mentioned this before — I do appreciate that he works so hard to protect his wife’s privacy. That woman would not last six months under you fangirls’ gentle ministrations and I bet Rory knows it. Yes, I find him quite attractive too. Plus he’s only five years older than me and weird in some of the ways I’m weird. Do you think I like this situation either? But at the same time I’m really pleased for him that he’s apparently found that sort of happiness (he’s always had other kinds). And given how long it took him to find it, it’s got to be all the sweeter for that. He did introduce me to Scotland in a big way, too (almost as big as he is!), and I’ll always be grateful.
And I still get to admire him from afar. And that’s even more fun than Dutch ovens and divorces.
Besides, these days I’ve got an in-person infatuation and I’m spending too many emotional and mental spoons trying to figure that out to fret overmuch about a guy half a world away who wouldn’t be attracted to me in the first place. I need to do something about my fondness for unavailable men (officially this other guy is single; emotionally, I’m not so sure), but at least he’s really nice, and we seem to be forming some sort of friendship. So that’s been an interesting plot twist this year. So… famous man? What famous man?
Nah, I’m kidding. I still enjoy running this site even if I’m shit at updating it. I expect I’ll do another little burst of work here soon. Won’t promise when. ‘Later…
YOU GUYS
Remember how I used to screenshot The Book Group off of Tubi? And then they took it off Tubi and I was mad?
Happy to report there are at least TWO Rory films on Tubi currently! Solomon Kane‘s there (search for it), but best of all? Beowulf and Grendel is there! I LOVE Rory as Breca. He did great in this one. I’ve also long wondered if doing this film was what got him bit with the boating bug. (It is definitely what kicked off his love affair with Iceland!)
Also see SK, although don’t expect to see the big man immediately — he turns up pretty far into the film, but he’s kind of funny in that one. There had been talk of it being the first film in a trilogy, so we probably would have seen more of his character, who I think was a lot more important in the original comics. But what can you do. Turned out for the best, I guess; I doubt he’d have had time for Game of Thrones if he’d still been filming those when that started.
[edit] Also the UK version of Shameless. I believe that’s the first two episodes of Season (series) 3. That’s the one where Rory plays the priest. Now, he’s kind of awkward in that one but (1) nervous actor — we’ve all known that from way back — and (2) I’m suspicious, just based on the lines he had, that the awkwardness might have been part of the point. I think the writers were taking the piss with the institution of the Catholic Church, just a bit. Which actually might have been why Rory took the role. I wish entertainment writers would ask better questions in interviews. ‘Cause there’s shit I end up wondering about and I never get to find out because big man hides out in Scotland and never talks to anyone. GRUMP.
Okay. Have fun with all of that. ‘Later, kids.
[edited again] Did you ever see Sixty-Six? It was another Rory film, except he just has a bit part in it near the end. It’s about a Jewish boy who’s about to have his bar mitzvah and it just happens to be scheduled on the same day as the World Cup. Anyway, the actor who plays the boy’s father is the same guy who played the Irish priest in Beowulf and Grendel. I don’t know why I didn’t notice that last time. Possibly I had seen B&G first, and then the other, and it didn’t even register. I also find that if I’m screenshotting something then my focus is very different than when I am just watching it straight. So maybe that was the problem. I wasn’t screenshotting this time.
Still, I wonder if Rory remembered the dude from one film to the other. That would have been cool.
I don’t know how seriously I take ScreenRant’s ability to assess which TV characters have the best scary-to-cuddly arcs, but I will say they ranked the Hound well above Negan from The Walking Dead, which is saying something.
I would recommend TWD to Rory, but as we more… dedicated? …fans are aware, Rory’s not into horror films. Ends up covering his eyes against the jump scares and such. Can’t see him making an exception for gory TV shows. I have no room to talk. When I used to binge TWD, I’d make sure I was knitting or crocheting something so I could look down at strategic moments. Not gonna say Rory’s a gigantic fanny because that would be really mean (and untrue, except possibly when he’s pranking around on set), but I looked less like one when I could fake having to watch what I was doing with my hands. Not that it was fake. I really did have to watch. But you know what I mean.
Never did knit anything for Rory, though as I understand it, he did get quite a few knitted things from fans. Do I want to know? Probably not.
But hey big man, if you’re ever in the market for a handknitted hat (you’re not), you know where I am. I completely sympathize with having a huge cranium. I don’t know if the UK has the same hat-size system as the USA, but on this side of the pond I wear a seven and a half. As with shoes, designers of women’s hats assume we’re all on the small side. It’s so ridiculous.
Okay, I will stop nattering at y’all for now. It’s just been a while so I figured it was babble time.
For those of you who are newer, you may be surprised to learn that Sandor “The Hound” Clegane, Rory McCann’s most popular role, isn’t actually my favorite role he’s done. That label more properly applies to Kenny McLeod, the sweet guy in the wheelchair who featured in The Book Group in 2002-2003.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t like Rory as Clegane, of course.
So I just wanted to peek in and mention that I’ve been seeing reels of the Hound on Facebook and YouTube and I gotta say, if Rory had any notion that fans have forgotten him, I’m happy to report that is not the case. In fact, I just saw some comments today asserting that the Hound was the best character in the entire Game of Thrones show.
THE best. Not third-best, not tenth-best, not “hey he had a cool cameo that one time, didn’t he?” THE best.
Made my heart happy to see. Thought I’d pass on the happy. 💛🖤
Was dusting off my personal Twitter (I will never get used to calling it X) and started following Emptage Hallett and damned if they didn’t have a photo of my dude from his turn in The Damned.
Love the big man all wild-looking like this. I don’t know if I’ll be able to see the film ever, but it ups my chances if it’s ever released on DVD. Ahem.
Seeing Rory’s Instagram story today reminded me: I got a message the other day from someone, I have no idea who, claiming affiliation with him and advising me to report anyone I saw impersonating him. I didn’t reply, because for all I know THAT was an imposter pretending to be affiliated with him. Did not see a need to encourage the behavior. But in case she reads here: Yes ma’am, I did get your message and I assure you, I already report these assholes. No problemo.
But I’ll spell it out again: This is Rory McCann’s only legitimate Instagram account. Accept no substitutes. I don’t even have a Rory-related account there anymore. I shut it down a couple years ago.
A funny story related to this: When I had the fan Instagram, I got a direct message once from a lady wrestler. I can’t remember her name and probably wouldn’t tell you if I could. She thought I was Rory and thanked me for supporting her career. I knew he takes the nephews to professional wrestling matches, or he used to, so I figured that had something to do with it — he probably met her backstage or something. Also I suspect he’s into brown-eyed blondes, and she was at least one-half of that description. So that likely added to the fandom quotient. But anyway, I informed her that sorry, no, I wasn’t Rory, just a fan IG about him — which, by the way, it always stated that in my profile, which she would have had to see when she went to message me so I’m not sure what happened there. She went quiet after that. Not even an “oops, my bad.” I found the whole thing amusing anyway. If there was ANY flirtation there whatsoever, thank fuck she didn’t try it in the DMs. Talk about awkward…
But anyhoo… please stop DMing me about this shit. I don’t know who you are, I’m already aware that Rory-impersonation is a big problem (as it is for most celebrities actually), and I do report them when I see them. I suggest you all do the same. IG will take them down faster.
Wish they’d do something about the lunatic who took up my real-name handle and stole my photo. I have lost count of how many times I’ve reported that asshole. But I’m not important at all, so what can you do.
Does it count as a sighting if the big man himself is reporting it?
There is definitely one other person aboard, which was also true when he went to Norway (he’s in Norway) five years ago. Probably the missus. Last time (or five years ago; he’s probably gone since) it was the guy from his home marina. I can’t fathom sailing a boat that size on that far of a trip all by yourself, though I’m sure there are people mad enough to try it. But also, someone would have to hold the phone to photograph him, sooooo.
I wonder if he’s just going because he likes Norway, or if there’s another concert, which is what it was five years ago. (Robert Plant! Who, I heard, actually invited him. Big Game of Thrones fan? Possibly.) Maybe we’ll hear at some point and maybe we won’t. Keeps it close to the vest, does oor Rory.
(Mwah.)
P.S. I actually saw his post ON THE SAME DAY. Not three weeks later. World fuckin’ record!
—
[edit] Oh for fuck’s sake. I SAW his words “Throwback Thorsday” and my mind skated RIGHT over them. Know what this is? It’s THE trip to Norway from FIVE YEARS AGO.
Because I KNEW I had seen that sweater (jumper) before. He was wearing it then! I saw pics of him in it.
Okay I’m gonna go feel dumb now. Don’t mind me. I thought it was weird he was giving coordinates…
[singsong] Somebody’s gonna get suuuuued [/singsong]
But… If you ever wanted Rory McCann in your bed, I suppose this is as good a way as any, and better than most. For one thing, he can keep his marriage vows. Convenient!
Here’s the archived page because even if the seller’s not sued or taken down, eBay listings eventually expire. You’re welcome.
NO, I’m not getting this, though I could use some bedsheets. I would like his poster from this film but for bedsheets, if I ever do lose my everlovin’ mind, I’d prefer him in his thirties and a kilt. He got way too far into the bad-guy thing as he got older and, well, I still find him quite appealing, but… you know.
Anyway. How ’bout them Mets. I’m gonna go… get some more coffee. Yeah. That’s it.