Meet Bernie Caulfield, the “beating heart” of Game of Thrones

Most Game of Thrones fans know who David Benioff and Dan Weiss are. A lot of non-Game of Thrones fans have heard of Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen). Far fewer have heard of Bernadette Caulfield, the show’s executive producer, but they’re missing out, because according to the cast and crew, Caulfield, who has been with the show since the second season, is its “beating heart.” Sophie Turner told The New York Times that Caulfield is “The woman that I want to grow up to be like,” Turner said. Lena Headey called her “the true Mother of Dragons,” and Benioff and Weiss said she was “the single best thing that ever happened to the show…Without her, the whole thing would have collapsed under its own weight long ago.”

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So what exactly does an executive producer do? Caulfield puts it like this: “My job is to make whatever they write on the page come to the screen.” That sounds simple, but let’s keep in mind that this is a show that features live bears, record numbers of stunt people set on fire, enormous sets, shoots all over the world, millions of dollars of special effects, thousands of extras, and Ser Pounce. Caulfield is in charge of it all, together with her “wingmen,” producer Chris Newman and production designer Deborah Riley, among many others. No show as complicated as Game of Thrones can be done alone, but the way cast and crew members talk about Caulfield, you’d think she could just about manage it.

“She created a production that could effectively scale up from season to season without losing either its efficiency or its heart,” Benioff and Weiss said. “There are so many versions of ‘Game of Thrones’ that would have fallen apart under the strain of producing 10 increasingly big hours of television on a 12-month schedule. Pretty much every version except the Bernie version.”

That’s truly the impressive thing to me. Game of Thrones was always a complex show to make, but it grew considerably between seasons 2 and 8, and Caulfield never let it spin out of control or stopped caring about the people she worked with. “I know how heavy cable is; I know what the crew has to go through — I’m actually married to a dolly grip,” she said. “Sometimes he’d say, ‘You love your crew more than me.’ Probably at that moment I do, because I have to.”

Several  of the cast members talked about Caulfield’s comforting demeanor on set. “She literally was the mum of the whole thing,” said Emilia Clarke.

"It was like, ‘Listen, I know we’re in the middle of a field and it’s 3 a.m. and it’s the second month of night shoots and everyone’s exhausted and everyone’s screaming at you because you are the person that everyone comes to for everything, but can I just talk to you about this Dothraki line I’ve got next week?’ And she will."

Another good story comes from Nikolaj Coster Waldau (Jaime Lannister), who recalled a time when he, under stress, almost blew up and had an on-set tantrum. “Suddenly she was next to me very gently saying, ‘Hey are you O.K.?’ And just the way she said that made me look at myself from the outside and see that I was about to turn into one of those horrible actors. So I am really grateful that she stopped me from becoming a complete fool.”

Herding dragons is one thing, but on a show with a cast as huge and important as Game of Thrones, keeping morale up is even more important, and that was a huge part of Caulfield’s job, whether it was supposed to be or not.“I do feel like I’m sensitive to seeing somebody who’s not smiling as much,” she said. “I still run into a lot of different crew, and you know, you hug them like you don’t want to let go. A lot of people felt like it was time to move on, but I also think if it went on another five years, everybody would have hung in there for five years. Because it meant that much to all of us.”

So thank you toBernadette Caulfield for making Game of Thrones what it is, and thank you to all the crew members we don’t necessarily hear about but who’ve worked tirelessly for years to make us happy.

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