20 takeaways from Fire Cannot Kill A Dragon, behind the scenes of Game of Thrones
By Daniel Roman
4. The production changed how it handled actor deaths after the Red Wedding traumatized everyone
Perhaps the most infamous event in all Game of Thrones was the Red Wedding, which shocked viewers the world over and flooded the internet with aghast reaction videos. The brutal murder of Robb Stark, his wife Talisa, and Stark matriarch Catelyn was about as devastating as plot twists get.
From a production standpoint, the Red Wedding was pretty unique. The sequence was filmed mostly in chronological order — a rarity on Thrones, which often shot scenes out of order and then pieced them together. According to Michelle Fairley (Catelyn Stark), that gave the shoot an atmosphere of impending doom. “I made sure that the most powerful points were near the end of the shoot,” said director David Nutter. “These are beloved characters that everybody loved being around. You want to build up the emotional journey of the sequence.”
As it turned out, that emotional journey ended up being…well, a bit more emotional than anticipated.
The final scene of the Red Wedding was also Richard Madden (Robb), Oona Chaplin (Talisa), and Michelle Fairley’s last day of filming on Game of Thrones. Each departed almost immediately afterward — Richard Madden wasn’t even able to stay for the wrap party because of another filming commitment. “We were mentally exhausted,” he remembered. “I cried my eyes out, completely, as did a lot of the crew and other actors. It was very emotional.”
But it wasn’t until a week later when David Benioff and Dan Weiss began to realize how traumatic the whole experience had been for those involved. “We tried to call Michelle afterward,” said Weiss. “She wasn’t answering. A week later she wrote an email saying, ‘Sorry I haven’t been able to talk to anybody about the show for the past week because I’ve been so shattered.'”
After that, the production reevaluated how it killed off characters, and tried to make sure that actors had at least after their characters were brutally murdered, so they could decompress and process.
