Nikolaj Coster-Waldau teases Season 6 finale, Jack Bender talks filming GoT, and more

Jack Bender may have been the biggest directorial name that show has landed in the latter half of its run. Known for his massive hit show Lost, among other things, Bender brought a level of time-hopping gravitas this season to a pair of episodes (“The Door” and “Blood of My Blood”) that featured some of the biggest uses of flashbacks by the show to date, chief among them Hodor’s simultaneous death and birth. But this wasn’t the first time the production had attempted to bring Bender aboard the show. According to the director, they’d asked before—he’d just never been able to make the massive commitment required.

Speaking to Variety in the wake of both of his episodes being including in the list of those up for Emmy nominations, Bender said he was really glad that Benioff and Weiss hadn’t given up on hiring him just because he hadn’t been able to make his schedule work in the past. “[T]hey said there was an iconic sequence in the episode that they thought I might be able to pull off and do well, and I think at the time they referred to me because of my time-weaving directorial experience on “Lost.” So when I committed to doing it and read the script, needless to say, I was thrilled, because everything great starts with a great script no matter what it is.”

But though he was hired because of his knowledge of how to pull off time travel onscreen, what really “jazzed” him was the prospect of getting to do the “play within the play”in Braavos. Bender praised the actors involved up and down. “With that “Game of Thrones” cast of brilliant actors, you say “thank you very much” and move on, because they’re so goddamn good.” For him, the real challenge was that six-month schedule.

"Because of the enormous schedule, two units work simultaneously all the time and usually there’s two to three directors shooting simultaneously, so at one point towards the end of my time there, I think there were four directors shooting, and that was both in Spain and Belfast. Working with Ellie [Kendrick] on that sequence with Bran in the woods and the wights coming out and attacking them, I couldn’t shoot that until towards the end of my time there, which was November, because Ellie was doing a movie, so there are logistical challenges. You shoot for a little bit at a time then you stop, then you prep, then you go to Spain, so it’s a little filmus interruptus; it’s a little tricky to keep the momentum and the flow up. But the reason it’s possible, and the thing that they do which is brilliant, is every director has his team… You go through the experience, prepping, shooting, stopping, starting, with your team, so there’s real continuity creatively, so you prep with them, you shoot with them, you eat most meals with them. That’s one of the more challenging things about doing the show, and also that’s the way it becomes possible, because even if you start and stop, you’ve got your team with you."

He says what set filming Game of Thrones apart from other show’s he’s moonlighted on was that even though this was the middle of the story, it still had huge moments. “Most great shows, they tend to start off big and end big, and the storytelling in the middle can just get you from A to Z, and not have massive, iconic sequences like I was very fortunate to get.”

On the other side of the camera, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) gave another interview about the goings-on at Riverrun in the show’s most recent episode, “No One.” To start, he talked about some familiar topics, like how Jaime’s maturation over the last few seasons helped him intimidate Edmure into handing over the castle peacefully, whereas a younger Jaime might have stormed Riverrun for the glory. He also touched on the eternal question: is there anything romantic in the relationship between Jaime and Brienne?

"The whole thing of being honorable, being trustworthy when it comes to the people they love or the people they’ve promised to protect, they’re each other’s equal that way. Jaime will do anything for Cersei. He believes it’s his duty but it’s also his choice, if you will. Brienne is now Sansa’s… whatever you call that. Kingsuard? I know there’s a word for it.…In a weird way, someone else’s agenda or feelings always come before [Brienne and Jaime’s] own. I’m not even sure that they would ever allow themselves to go to that place. There’s no question you see that in this scene: There is more between them."

He also suggested that a good way for Jaime to go out would be if Brienne killed him with his own sword, but we can put a pin in that for now. Finally, he offered tiny teases of the final two episodes of the season.

"I think the next episode is the biggest they’ve made, in terms of scale. Production-wise. A lot of stunt guys were working on that episode. And the last episode, it’s just, it’s… no I can’t give you anything. [Laughs] It’s a cool ending to Season 6."

We’ve also got an interview with Iain Glen (Jorah Mormont). He stopped by The Daily Beast to talk about his new “aboriginal superhero series” Cleverman, and chatted about Jorah ongoing devotion to Daenerys Targaryen while he was at it. “There are probably more people within the series with ill intentions or conflicted intentions than good intentions, but [Jorah] has a pure line,” he said. “But I also wanted him in some ways to be an ordinary man, because I think she is extra-ordinary and that’s what fuels his huge passion for her.”

He also mentions that having Daenerys and Jorah spend time apart in Season 5 may have been necessary to understand what they mean to each other, and considering how affecting their goodbye scene was in “The Door,” he may have a point. Inevitably, the interviewer asked Glen if Jorah would survive his greyscale, and while the actor didn’t confirm or deny anything, his response sounded like he was looking back on a time of his life that was over, although there are other ways to take it. You be the judge:

"All I can say is it’s been a dream job from beginning to end…It’s sort of changed all our lives for the good. I’m hugely grateful, really, for the experience of being on it. The show is bigger than any single person within it. It just fills me with excitement every year at the prospect of reading those next scripts and going back to work and getting into that costume again and hanging out with the same people. It’s a ball."

And here’s the trailer for Cleverman.

h/t TV Line