Game of Thrones star recalls literally being waterboarded for her scene

Hannah Waddingham didn’t have many lines on Game of Thrones, but the few she did have stuck. She played Septa Unella, better known as the Shame Nun who marched Cersei Lannister stark naked through the streets of King’s Landing while ringing her bell and yelling, “Shame!” There’s no forgetting that.

Naturally, Cersei wasn’t going to rest until she got revenge, and get it she did. After blowing up the Sept of Baelor and killing Unella’s boss and coworkers in the season 6 finale, Cersei captured Unella, strapped her to a table, gave a villainous speech and left her to the care of the Mountain.

The scene is brutal, and apparently it was going to be worse. “She was meant to be raped by The Mountain, and I think they’d had so many complaints about the rape of Sansa [in season 5] that they chose not to go with it,” Waddingham recently told Collider. “I think they possibly changed it when I was mid-air flying to Belfast because suddenly I got sent these new sides that said that I would need a wetsuit top. And I thought they’d sent me the wrong bits. And sure enough, when I got there, I was then put in a wetsuit top and I was like, ‘Because?’ And they went, ‘Oh, it’s waterboarding instead.’”

Game of Thrones star Hannah Waddingham was basically tortured on set

And when she says “waterboarding,” she’s not kidding. That wasn’t a special effect we were seeing. “And there I was strapped to a wooden table with proper big straps for 10 hours,” Waddingham continued. “And definitely, other than childbirth, it was the worst day of my life. Because Lena [Headey] was uncomfortable pouring liquid in my face for that long, and I was beside myself. But in those moments you have to think, do you serve the piece and get on with it or do you chicken out and go, ‘No, this isn’t what I signed up for, blah, blah, blah?’ And then, the funny thing was, after we’d finished shooting it for the whole day, and people like Miguel Sapochnik, the director by the way, walking past with a cup of tea and a sandwich on-the-go and going, ‘Hi hunny, you alright?’ And I was like, ‘Not really.’ ‘The crew have just been saying we are actually really waterboarding you here.’ And I was like, ‘Yup, you don’t need to tell me that!’”

"When I got back to the hotel that night, I was going up in the left and I was standing next to [Eugene Simon, who played Lancel Lannister] who had had to crawl through loads of sh*t to get out of the Sept of Baylor and he was like, ‘Oh my god, what happened to you today?’ I could barely speak because I had been screaming through The Mountain’s hand, which is quite frightening as a singer to completely lose your voice, so I had no voice at all to barely whisper, bruises already coming up like I had been attacked and I was like, ‘I’ve basically just been waterboarded for ten hours.’ And he went, ‘Mate, I’ve just been crawling through sh*t for four days on my elbows.’ So we were like, ‘See? You haven’t been in Game of Thrones unless you’ve been really, really, battered around.’"

Obviously no one on the Game of Thrones intended to hurt Waddingham, but a more formal form of waterboarding is considered torture, and the experience had some lasting effects. “I hadn’t even realized that it definitely gave me claustrophobia around water,” the actor said. “Definitely. I hadn’t realized until I watched a program where the camera’s down on the actor’s face and they’re being dipped into the water, but you see them face-up to the camera, and I got in a terrible panic about it. And I actually went and had a bit of a chat to somebody about it, because it’s quite full-on being waterboarded for 10 hours, and then only one minute and 30 seconds can be used on camera.”

"As a singer, the one thing that I was really worried about, I didn’t want the strap tight around my neck, but as they pointed out, if the camera can see you lifting your head up to save yourself, that’s not authentic. And it was [showrunner] Dan Weiss that came up to me and went, ‘Look, in the script it says Cersei empties the remainder of her glass of red wine to wake up Unella. People aren’t gonna think that’s enough. What you’ve put her character through, that is not enough retribution for Cersei, especially the kind of person that she is. It needs to be more like a three quarter full [glass], also if we can cheat it even more carafe of wine.’ And that’s what I mean about that moment of fight or flight. I just thought, ‘Do you know what?’ The one thing I kept thinking to myself, ‘The production company aren’t going to let you die, so get on with it, be uncomfortable.’ Like you were saying in your question, I would say, get on with it. As long as you feel like there’s not any genuine threat of something happening, push yourself, be uncomfortable. It’s the same as if people don’t cry on camera, don’t impart this emotion to the right moment. Why not? My whole thing has always been, take people to the absolute nth degree of their emotions and that’s the same thing. Give of yourself and then it gives back to you."

Miguel Sapochnik is now one of the co-showrunners on House of the Dragon, HBO’s first Game of Thrones prequel series. As for Waddingham, she’s killing it on Ted Lasso on Apple TV+, where unless things take a very surprising hard turn she’s unlikely to face anything near as intense as she did on Game of Thrones.

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