The direwolves on Game of Thrones were “supposed to mean more”

Game of Thrones writer Bryan Cogman explains why the direwolves weren’t given as much screen time as originally intended.

Never underestimate the power of a good animal mascot. The characters on Game of Thrones may have driven the plot, but among neophytes, the series was often known as “that dragon show” or “the show with the giant wolves.” Daenerys’ dragons and the Stark direwolves became beloved ambassadors for the series, and will always have a special place in fans’ hearts.

That said, as the show went on, fans noticed that it tended to lean heavier on the dragons than the direwolves. Even right at the start they were causing trouble, as writer Bryan Cogman remembered when recalling the scene where Ned and his sons find the dead direwolf and stag in the woods. Production, it seems, used a real deer corpse to stand in for the stag, and the resulting stench was…

“I’ve still never smelled anything so terrible, and I wasn’t even anywhere near it,” Cogman says in James Hibberd’s new oral history of the show, Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon. “I was across the meadow in a producer’s tent. Just thinking about it, I can smell it right now.”

Gives you a new appreciation for the actors, eh?

Anyway, apparently working with the direwolves was trickier than anticipated. “The direwolves were supposed to mean more than they ended up meaning,” Cogman said. “Even in the first season, there were a lot of direwolf scenes we had to cut, even though we were just using dogs, because the dogs couldn’t execute the scenes; it would just take too long.”

As the show went on and the series had to prioritize what it spent its money on, the direwolves often found themselves losing out to other expensive creatures. For example, in the Battle of the Bastards, the show had enough money to include Jon’s direwolf Ghost or Wun Wun the giant, and Wun Wun got the nod.

Honestly, I don’t have a big problem with that one, but it’s a shame we had to give up Ghost for moments like this:

The final two seasons featured a lot of set pieces where the dragons were wrecking s**t, and although Game of Thrones was the most expensive show on TV, it still had a budget, and I’m guessing the producers couldn’t find a way to work the direwolves into it in a significant way. (FYI, fur is notoriously different to render in CGI.) We still had some great direwolf scenes, like the one where Arya encounters a grown-up Nymeria, but they were few and far between.

Hell, sometimes the show couldn’t do everything it wanted to do with the dragons: recall that the only dragon-vs-dragon fight we got came in “The Long Night,” when we could barely see any of it.

That surely saved on money but it would have been nice to see this battle in more detail.

It also makes me wonder how HBO will manage all the dragon fights in the dragon-happy prequel series House of the Dragon, but we’ll get there when we get there.

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h/t TV Line