Inside the disastrous original Game of Thrones pilot: “Nobody knew what they were doing”

The cast and crew of Game of Thrones remember the first, incredibly rough pilot episode. What was cut? Why were certain actors replaced?

Game of Thrones was easily the most talked-about and popular show of the past decade, but it very nearly didn’t happen. Famously, the show shot a pilot that almost no one liked. They were given a second chance to do it over again, which ended up working out, but it was a near thing.

Entertainment Weekly writer James Hibberd covers this chapter in Game of Thrones history, as well as a lot more, in his upcoming oral history book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Untold Story of the Epic Series, which is full of remembrances from the people who were there. EW just published an excerpt about the failed pilot. Let’s take a look at just how upside down things were back then.

“Nobody knew what they were doing or what the hell this was,” said Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister), mincing no words. “During King Robert’s arrival I remember finding the whole thing ridiculous. The absurdity of doing this parallel universe with these very noble men. It’s a very fine balance between being serious and believing it and just being cosplayers. There was certainly not a sense that this was going to be some game-changer for anyone. But we had a lot of fun.”

Mark Addy (Robert Baratheon) also talked about that key scene, and how it was different in the original pilot. “In the Winterfell courtyard scene, nobody kneeled when the king arrived in the first pilot,” he said. “You can’t play being the king. You can’t display ‘look at how powerful I am.’ People have to give you that by showing subservience. It has to be afforded to you by others. In the reshoot, everybody kneeled. It made a huge difference in terms of establishing who’s in charge.”

That definitely does sound like an improvement. Although there’s at least one thing I would have like to see from the original pilot: Lena Headey’s (Cersei Lannister) original look. “I looked like a Vegas showgirl in the [original] pilot — furs and massive hair, like a medieval Dolly Parton,” Headey recalled. “Not that I’m complaining, I loved it. My hair devolved.”

Anyway, King Robert’s arrival wasn’t the only scene that wasn’t working. “When we first shot the scene where the Starks find the direwolves — this was the version you never saw — the wonder of what a direwolf was wasn’t coming across,” said Bryan Cogman, then an assistant to showrunner David Benioff who would go on to become a writer on the show. “It didn’t seem important enough to the characters. And I’m little assistant Bryan running around the set yelling to anyone who would listen: ‘These are direwolves! No one has seen these in a million years! This is like seeing dinosaurs! It’s not like finding puppies!’ And everyone’s sort of chuckling.”

There were tone problems, too, with the team unsure how thoroughly they should embrace the series’ high fantasy aesthetic. “Is it fantasy with dramatic trappings?” Cogman said. “Is it a drama with fantasy trappings? There was a nervousness about the pilot leaning into the fantasy too much — ultimately to a fault. Key exposition was cut to make the dialogue sound more ‘real,’ and as a result, the pilot didn’t make much sense. The impulse to not be over-the-top Shakespearian and Tolkien-esque was right — you’re trying to make it as grounded as possible — but this is still an epic fantasy, and if you ignore that, it’s to the detriment of your story.”

A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin weighed in, as well, remembering how the showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss at first wanted to cut Rickon Stark (Art Parkinson) from the story, since he didn’t do much in the first book. “I said I had important plans for him, so they kept him.”

"I liked the pilot. I realized later that I was a poor person to judge because I was too close to it. Some didn’t know Jaime and Cersei were brother and sister. Well that wasn’t a problem for me! My great familiarity with the material made it hard for me to objectively judge. I liked that they kept a considerable level of complexity. I’m told I’m under penalty of death if I ever show it to anyone."

Indeed, the issue of people not realizing that Jaime and Cersei were brother and sister was a big one that cropped up when Benioff and Weiss showed the pilot to friends. Because if you don’t know they’re brother and sister, then you don’t understand why Jaime pushes Bran out the window at the end of the pilot, and the dramatic climax to the episode is shot. In the redone pilot, the show added a scene of Jaime and Cersei chatting in King’s Landing so the message would get across:

EW also mentions that the producers “tried to help explain the show’s backstory by adding at least one flashback (of Ned Stark’s father and brother being killed by the Mad King), but that idea was later scrapped as it just seemed to add to the narrative muddiness.” An image from scene does survive, though, with Sean Bean playing Ned’s brother Brandon, with Aerys Targaryen looming in the background:

Martin was also present for the wedding of Daenerys Targaryen (originally played by Tamzin Merchant) and Khal Drogo. “I went to Morocco for Dany’s wedding in the first pilot,” Martin remembered. “I played a Pentoshi nobleman with beard extensions and an enormous hat. I looked like an idiot, but it was fun.”

Can confirm:

“There are a couple of stories,” Martin continued. “As a wedding gift, Khal Drogo gives Daenerys a silver horse and she rides away. For a moment you think she’s fleeing. Then she turns the horse around and leaps the horse over a big campfire. Drogo is very impressed, and it starts the relationship on a good note. We tried to film this scene. We got a top stunt rider and a top horse, a silver filly, but the filly would not jump that campfire. She got close and then was like, ‘There’s fire there!’ and would turn the other way. We tried to film it a half dozen ways. So [director Tom McCarthy] goes, ‘Put out the fire and we’ll do the fire with CGI.’ They put out the fire and the horse would still not jump the dead fire. It’s a smart horse. It knows it’s not burning now, but it was burning a little while ago! So they had to scrap that sequence, which was unfortunate, as it was a bonding moment between Dany and Khal Drogo.”

"Then came the filming of the wedding night. In the Emilia Clarke version, it’s rape. It’s not rape in my book, and it’s not rape in the scene as we filmed it with Tamzin Merchant. It’s a seduction. Dany and Drogo don’t have the same language. Dany is a little scared but also a little excited, and Drogo is being more considerate. The only words he knows are “yes” or “no.” Originally it was a fairly faithful version."

Also interesting is that the original version of the wedding was filmed at night, whereas the final version was set during the day with plenty of sunshine. That was a point of contention for HBO, because why do this expensive location shoot if you can’t see anything? “Some bigwig at HBO said, ‘Why the f— did we go to Morocco? You can’t see f—ing diddly squat, we could have shot it in a car park!'” remembered Iain Glen (Jorah Mormont).

So it was clear the original pilot wasn’t working. It fell to Benioff and Weiss to talk to the execs at HBO and get things back on track. “We’d done a lot of soul searching,” Dan Weiss remembered. “The one thing I think we did right is we owned all the mistakes. We didn’t point fingers. We said: ‘We know this isn’t good, and here is what went wrong and how we would do it differently the next time.’ We just went down the line. I think they got the sense, which was honest, that we weren’t coming in trying to explain why the bugs were features. We were all on the same page that where we want to be is many levels up from this.”

In the end, Richard Plepler, the former CEO of HBO, decided to give the show another chance. “You could see that some of the casting and the narrative was off,” he remembered. “It needed to be fixed; it needed to be reshot. But the overall emotional response was that you could feel how engaging it could be. So just as you could feel there were a range of problems that needed to be addressed, you could equally feel that there was magic in there.”

And so the team went back to reshoot the pilot, but there were some changes made. Jennifer Ehle, who played Catelyn Stark in the original pilot, decided she didn’t want to move to Norther Ireland, so she backed out of the project. The team brought in Michelle Fairley after David Benioff saw her as Emilia in a production of Othello in London. “Emilia’s not a character I generally notice in Othello,” Benioff said. “Iago’s wife? Who cares? But Michelle was so absurdly good that I left the theater thinking, ‘Who the hell was that? And is she available?’”

Then there was the need to replace Tamzin Merchant as Daenerys Targaryen; apparently, it just wasn’t a good fit. “We all knew Daenerys’s journey was critical,” recalled former HBO programming president Michael Lombardo. “Her scenes with Jason just didn’t work.”

That would be Jason Momoa, who played Daenerys’ Dothraki husband Khal Drogo. “[Merchant] was great,” he said. “I’m not sure why everything was done. But when Emilia got there that’s when everything clicked for me. I wasn’t really ‘there’ until she arrived.”

Cogman, too, agrees that Emilia Clarke ended up being a better fit in the long run. “Everybody involved in making the original pilot scored such a bull’s‑eye with so many of our actors. I thought Tamzin did a really good job. It’s hard to say why things didn’t work out. Ultimately, it’s obvious Emilia Clarke was born to play that part.”

 Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Untold Story of the Epic Series comes out on October 6.

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