Tomorrow, TIME is releasing a double-issue all about Game of Thrones. Journalist Daniel D’addario spent a lot of time with the cast and crew on the set of season 7, and got all kinds of inside access. Let’s go behind the scenes with him as the cast and crew talk about their characters, season 7, and the end of the show.
Let’s start with Kit Harington, who says that season 7 represents a “huge seismic shift” for Jon Snow, although he trails off before he reveals too much. “He’s still the same Jon, but he grows up.”
Harington also reflected on his relationship with the character over the years. “I made mistakes and felt that he wasn’t interesting enough,” he said. “That sounds weird, but I’ve never been quite content with him. Maybe that’s what makes him him. That angst.”
Emilia Clarke, for her part, doesn’t seem too affected by angst. D’addario watched her spend a lot of time riding a giant mechanical rig that represents Drogon, the biggest of her dragons. “We knew it would be a mechanical bull,” said Game of Thrones showrunner David Benioff. “We didn’t know it would be 40 ft. in the air and six degrees of motion with cameras that swirl. It’s like the thing NASA built to train the astronauts.”
If Clarke is bored by the weeks she’s spent on that thing, “getting blasted with water and fake snow and whatever else they decide to chuck at her through the fans,” she doesn’t show it. “I’m 5-ft.-nothing, I’m a little girl,” she says. “They’re like, ‘Emilia, climb those stairs, get on that huge thing, we’ll harness you in, and then you’ll go crazy.’ And you’re like, ‘Hey, everybody! Now who’s shorty?!’”
As a sidenote, while the rigs that represent the dragons getting bigger every year, it sounds like they’ve finally reached their peak. “Now the dragon doesn’t get any bigger,” producer Bernadette Caulfield said, “so we know that much.” Finally, D’addario notes that Alan Taylor was directing Clarke while she was on the bull, which means she was filming the sixth episode of the season.
Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister) and Nicolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) were on hand, too, to discuss the twisted relationship between their characters that, despite it being all kinds of deviant, has withstood the test of time. “Cersei’s always wanted to be him,” Headey said of Jaime. “Therefore, for her, that relationship is completion. There’s been an envy, because he was born with privilege just for being a man. I think their love was built on respect.”
Headey clearly loves talking about the topic, Coster-Waldau a little less so:
"I’ve never really gone too deep into the whole sister-brother thing because I can’t use that information. I have to look at her as the woman he loves and desires. Lena’s a very good actress, and that’s kind of what carries the whole thing. I have two older sisters. I do not want to go there. It’s just too weird."
It’s a little surprising that Coster-Waldau hasn’t reconciled himself to the nature of the Jaime-Cersei relationship after all this time, but then again, if there’s one relationship on the show that’s difficult to stomach, that’s the one.
Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), meanwhile, is happy to be on a fantasy show that breaks new ground. “This was the first time in this genre that somebody my size was an actually multidimensional being, flesh and blood without the really long beard, without the pointy shoes, without the asexuality,” he said. Tyrion, D’addario points out, is a character who is anything but asexual. He wants sex and wine and pleasure, but beyond that, he wants love and respect. The last two things are harder to come by, but Tyrion has his coping mechanisms.
"He covers it up with alcohol, he covers it up with humor, he does his best to maintain a modicum of sanity and he perseveres. He’s still alive. Anyone who’s still alive on our show is pretty smart."
So interviews with cast members is all well and good, but did anything say anything about what’s coming in season 7 or beyond? Read on.
Next: Of wolves, dragons, and the series finale of Game of Thrones
As you may have heard by now, Game of Thrones season 7 is going to be big. “At first we had a season with one big event,” said special effects supervisor Joe Bauer. “[T]hen we had a season with two big events, now we have a season where every episode is a big event.”
D’addario doesn’t go into specifics on what those events are, but he does talk in rhapsodic terms about a battle he witnessed being filmed in a massive quarry in Belfast. It involved Jon Snow, “a frigid North Atlantic wind that whipped everyone during filming,” and a line of wights waiting to grab breakfast burritos. “Thrones has been promising this clash all along,” he writes, “and when the time comes, the Internet will melt.”
If you’re the kind of fan who pays attention to SPOILERS, you can probably guess at what D’addario is talking about.
Intriguingly, D’addario also notes that there was a problem during his time on set: the production was supposed to work with some wolves described in the script as “skinny and mangy,” but the wolves on set looked “fluffy and lustrous.” In addition to being a funny look into the unique problems encountered by TV producers (“Why don’t these wolves look more malnourished?” I imagine someone screaming), fans may wonder what the production would want with a bunch of wolves. Again, SPOILER-loving readers may already have an idea.
It’s a tough job, managing a show of this scale, but showrunner Dan Weiss says that “[t]here’s still a kid-in-a-candy-shop feel.
"You’re going to look at the armor, crazy-amazing dresses—gowns Michele is making—then you’re going to look at the swords, then watch pre-vis cartoons of the scenes that will be shot and you’re weighing in on shot selection. Every one of these things is something we’ve been fascinated with in our own way since we were kids."
Lastly, D’addario turned to the mysterious season 8, which will air in either 2018 or 2019. During D’addario’s visit, Benioff and Weiss had the season in outline form. “We know what happens in each scene,” said Weiss.
The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones will have just six episodes, and is already one of the most anticipated finales in the history of TV. Obviously, that can be a little nerve-wracking. “I’m not saying we don’t think about it.” Weiss said. “The best way to go about it is to focus on what’s on the desk in front of you, or what sword is being put in front of you, or the fight that is being choreographed in front of you.”
And what, you may ask, will the finale involve? Game of Thrones is famously based on a series of novels that are not yet complete. It’s a sure thing that the show will wrap up long before George R.R. Martin finishes his planned seven-novel series, the fifth and most recent of which was published in 2011. Benioff and Weiss, foreseeing this possibility, met with Martin “[b]etween Seasons 2 and 3” to map out the plot in the event that they blew past the source material. Said Benioff:
"Certain things that we learned from George way back then are going to happen on the show, but certain things won’t. And there’s certain things where George didn’t know what was going to happen, so we’re going to find them out for the first time too."
There’s no doubt that Benioff and Weiss have taken more ownership of the story the further along it went and the less source material they had to work with. What they have in store for the endgame is a mystery we’ll all get to enjoy together, soon enough.
Next: Check out a couple more new images from Game of Thrones season 7
Notables
David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) all addressed the controversy surrounding the scene in season 5 where Ramsay Bolton rapes Sansa on their wedding night. “This was the trending topic on Twitter, and it makes you wonder, when it happens in real life, why isn’t it a trending topic every time?” Turner said.
"This was a fictional character, and I got to walk away from it unscathed … Let’s take that discussion and that dialogue and use it to help people who are going through that in their everyday lives. Stop making it such a taboo, and make it a discussion."
Benioff, meanwhile, explained why he and Weiss made that story choice. “It might not be our world, but it’s still the same basic power dynamic between men and women in this medieval world,” he said. “This is what we believed was going to happen.” Weiss addedhis take:
"We talked about, is there any other way she could possibly avoid this fate that doesn’t seem fake, where she uses her pluck to save herself at the last? There was no version of that that didn’t seem completely horrible."
Other interesting stuff:
- According to the show’s wig person, the color of Emilia Clarke’s wig “is the result of 2½ months’ worth of testing and seven prototypes.”
- The original pilot for Game of Thrones was a legendary disaster, in part because Benioff and Weiss were new to TV and were learning as they went. One mistake they made was the design of the White Walkers — they hadn’t figured it out yet, so they just put a guy in a green screen suit and decided to come back to it later. “You can maybe do that if you’re making Avatar,” said Weiss. “But we need to know what the creatures look like before we turn on the camera.”
- Headey on how fans view Cersei: “At the beginning, people were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re such a bitch!’ What’s moving is that people love her now and want to be on her team.”
- Carloyn Strauss, the head of HBO’s entertainment division at the time Benioff and Weiss pitched the show, remembers her thought process: “They were talking about this series of books I’d never heard of. [I was] somebody who looked around the theater in Lord of the Rings, at all of those rapt faces, and I am just not on this particular ferry … I thought, This sounds interesting. Who knows? It could be a big show.” You think?