From Ned Stark’s Valyrian steel sword Ice to the javelin the Night King used to bring down Viserion, Game of Thrones is filled with iconic weaponry. The man responsible for designing those weapons, Tommy Dunne, talked to Business Insider about where he gets his ideas:
"I never look and never chase up the image that George had in his books, because I didn’t want to be persuaded by his feel or his interpretation, I like my feel of it and my interpretation of what it is."
“George,” of course, is George R.R. Martin, author of the Song of Ice and Fire novels. Some of the weapons, like the Night King’s javelin, haven’t yet appeared on the page, but if Dunne truly didn’t leaf through the books before designing the look of, say, the Dothraki arakh, he sure managed to capture their spirit.
Looking back on the many weapons he’s created, Dunne named Brienne’s sword Oathkeeper as one of his trickiest, “aking sure it looked like what it was, using jewels like Swarovski crystals.” There were also problems of a sort after Gwendoline Christie got ahold of the sword. “ith some of our training regimes for example, we had Pod and Brienne fighting That’s a scenario where we had to make sure that there was a bit of bamboo to try and slow down and take the power away from Brienne. Especially that Gwendoline is a strong girl and puts a lot of power into it. So we just had to try and find a way of pulling that power back a little bit.”
"The problem with an aluminium sword or even a wooden sword is that’s really gonna hit hard onto another sword. But when you’re fighting with a bamboo, you’ll find that less is more with them. So it actually does slow them down a bit with the power."
Dunne and his team create up to four versions of important weapons, each made of a different material: aluminum, bamboo, rubb and a “hero” version made of actual steel. “We’d never fight with but we’d always have them for the hero feel, the hero look.” We’re guessing those are the ones that mysteriously walked off set during season 8.
Dunne also had nice things to say about Maisie Williams, who handles Arya’s sword Needle with aplomb.
"It was exactly what the name said. It looks like a needle. It’s quite a natural small little sword. And it hasn’t changed, the holder hasn’t changed. It’s all as is, obviously she’s grown up, not a lot but she’s grown up. So the sword has kept with her, it’s the same. We’ve never had to play with it. Actually she’s always been good with it, considering how she fights. She fights left-handed but she’s actually right-handed."
Finally, he answered a question we’ve had for a while: just how does the special effects team get Beric Dondarrion’s flaming sword to light up?
"That’s a combination between ourselves and the special effects team, because obviously I made and designed the original one, which was quite a basic sword, nothing fancy about it, the Beric one, but then obviously the special effects team had to come up with a procedure of lighting it, so they made an internal gas system into a hollow sword and then we just supplied all the crossguards on with the handpiece, so they would make a gas rig and they would make a, basically a sword that was impregnated with a lighting liquid, that could be lit by flame, so it would keep alight for, about half a minute and I think it was simple enough, the physical one that they fought with, but the gas one was a bit intricate. To ignite it and to turn it off, but the effects did a very, very good job, good lads."
And of course, Business Insider couldn’t let Dunne go without getting a little tease for season 8. “I woke my deaf grandmother screaming at the television,” the interview said of watching “Battle of the Bastards.” To which Dunne replied:
"I think you’ll wake up a few ancestors this year, next year when it next comes out, not only your granny."
Season 8: So good you’ll wake your ancestors.
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