On Game of Thrones, we first meet the Night King — the leader of the White Walkers — in “Oathkeeper,” in season 4, when he steps up to an icy alter and turns the ices of one of Craster’s sons a pale blue. There’s a new member of the family.
Even in his first appearance, the look of the Night King was pretty nailed down: we see the outlines of his armor, his creaky lines of his face, and the thorny spikes on his head, spikes that make it look like he’s wearing a crown. Even as he switched actors — from Richard Brake to Vladimir Furdik — this look would remain essentially the same.
But it wasn’t always so. Joanna Robinson of Vanity Fair has debuted a new image from The Art of Game of Thrones, a book from Insight Editions showcasing the concept art of the show. As you can see, production designer Deborah Riley and her team originally conceived the Night King as looking quite different:
The Art of Game of Thrones
The crown! The robes! This is Westeros’ deadliest baddie as we’ve never seen him.
Speaking to Robinson, Riley talked about her team’s process. Usually, they would get an outline for the upcoming season and start mocking up concepts. For most scenes, they could just depict the actors in the cast. But the Night King was a new character who doesn’t appear in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels (there is a character called “the Night’s King,” a legendary figure Old Nan told Bran about, but the two characters are different), so the designers didn’t have as much to work with. That meant they could get a little creative.
Barrie Gower, a prosthetics designer on the show, said he was asked to create something “regal” with “familiar White Walker traits” for the new character. “He would be the leader of the White Walkers, the original White Walker, so we needed him to have a sense of power,” Gower said.
"We talked about creating a crown that could be fused into his head, something organic, that felt very much a part of him. As the White Walkers have a very icy and cold palette, it made sense to explore sharp and angular forms, with a translucent quality to help sell the sub zero temperature of his flesh."
Personally, I love the original design. He looks older and wiser, which makes sense if he’s the first White Walker. The final version looked more battle-ready, which makes sense if he’s going to war, but I wish they’d kept this.
Robinson suggests that the design team may have lost the robes and high-pointed crown because it wouldn’t have worked well for the battle scenes the Night King was going to be involved in, and I suppose that’s true — he would have looked awkward riding atop Viserion — but really, was the Night King involved in that many battles? He never swung a sword. Mostly he stood back from the chaos and observed. I think the character as originally conceived would have cut a striking figure, doing that. What do you all think?
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