Deborah Riley looks back on production designing Game of Thrones

The woman responsible for the looks of Dragonstone, Winterfell and the Red Keep explains what it was being the production designer on Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones is a famously opulent show — the costumes are fantastic, the special effects are glorious and the sets are so detailed you’d think the characters really were walking around Westeros instead of a sound stage in Northern Ireland.

For five of the show’s eight seasons, Deborah Riley was the woman in charge of making sure the sets looked right. “I’m the head of the art department, and the art department are responsible for all of the environments in which the film takes place,” she said in an interview a few months after the show aired its series finale. “We’re also responsible for the props that the actors hold, and all of the things that go along with that. When we’re shooting on location then we augment locations to suit the show.”

By the time she landed Thrones, Riley was already an industry veteran, working on visually complex movies like The Matrix and Moulin Rogue!, but working on Game of Thrones was like “having to walk in a new skin.”

"I’m just somebody who works behind the camera. But suddenly there was a real focus on it and people were so interested in the show. Just the unbelievable amount of attention that the show had was just bananas."

Still, there was no question this was a show she wanted to be a part of. “When I saw Game of Thrones, when I realized the rich textures that the show existed in, I just knew in my very bones that’s where I belonged.” If she didn’t get it, Riley planned to go back to her native Australia. Happily, that didn’t happen.

Riley joined the show in season 4, right when it was really taking off in the public consciousness, meaning there were lots of people who wanted to ask her what she knew about the story. “That was kind of weird, to be honest,” Riley said. “You know there are people that would literally take my teeth to learn the secrets that I have in my head.”

"We would have people who would climb trees and just go to extraordinary lengths to try and see an actor in costume or to try and guess at some plotline or other. Even posting on Facebook, you just could never let on where you were, what you might be doing there, who you might have been with. And it made me incredibly cautious of social media. I think that’ll have a lifelong effect."

The notoriety had its upside, though, like the five Emmy nominations and four wins. “It made my mum and I cry,” Riley said of her fifth nod. “You never think in a million years that you could possibly be lucky to be recognized every year that we worked on the show. I mean, that’s something that makes me really speechless.”

The final season of Game of Thrones was far and away its most controversial, and also its most lavish. Riley had a big hand in the look of sequences like the Battle of Winterfell, which was an agonizing ordeal to film. “When you’re standing in the trenches at 4:30 in the morning, in the pitch dark, in the freezing cold and in the fake snow … you need to be standing there with people that you really like and that you can rely on and you do really good work with,” she said. “The responsibility that we felt towards each other was really important because we didn’t want to let each other down, let alone [series creators] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss], and let alone the fans of the show at large.”

Of course, many fans did feel let down by season 8, but Riley felt some of the brunt. As the woman in charge of props, she got some of the blame for that infamous coffee cup visible on a table in “The Last of the Starks.”

“Fabian Wagner, who was the cinematographer of ‘The Long Night,’ contacted me and said he was very happy because he’d gone from being the most hated person on the internet to handing that over to me,” Riley said. “It was very bizarre. My email was sort of being filled with questions from TMZ and other sort of magazines. I just looked at it and thought ‘I’m not going to answer this, I’m not going to play into all of that’. And there were enough people who were doing that for me.”

As for the ending, Riley knew about it around a year out from the air date. “I was really looking forward to actually being free of it,” she said. “Knowing how the show was ending, I found carrying that around quite a lot of pressure.”

At least she had a cool take-home gift to remember it by: one of the tiny dragon skulls that once surrounded the Iron Throne when Aerys Targaryen sat in it, later stored in a chamber underneath the Red Keep.

As for what’s next, Riley is keeping her options open. “So long as I don’t see another medieval barrel for the rest of my career, I’m open to anything.”

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