The other week, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss sat down for a rare interview with The Hollywood Reporter, mostly to promote their new Netflix show 3 Body Problem. But of course, THR snuck in some questions about GoT, which included pressing the producers on what, if anything, they would change about the show if they could.
“One thing I know I wish we could have done is there’s the character Mord the Jailer,” Benioff said, referring to the dull-witted prison guard played by Ciaran Bermingham who slapped Tyrion Lannister around while he was a prisoner in the Eyrie in season 1. Weiss agreed. “It was a mistake not bringing Mord the Jailer back into it,” he said. “We always talked about doing it.”
In fact, they sort of had a plan for how Mord could return. “There’s a scene set in a tavern…” Benioff mused, and Weiss picked it up the thought:
"Was it Brienne or The Hound? But we realized too late that Mord could have owned the tavern. We could have had that actor in the background acting exactly the way he did as a jailer, except now as a small business owner. It was just such an obvious, no-brainer, day-after idea."
If you remember, when Tyrion left the Eyrie, he gave Mord a big bag of gold in return for taking him out of his cell and bringing him before Lysa Arryn. I guess that's how Mord bought the tavern.
Game of Thrones showrunners wanted more of Mord the jailor
So that's the one thing that Benioff and Weiss would have changed about Game of Thrones, which I'm sure amuses those fans who so loathed the ending that nearly 2 million of them signed a petition for the final season to be remade.
Of course, I suspect Benioff and Weiss are having some fun here. As THR says, "they staunchly avoid reflecting on the series — they feel it wouldn’t benefit themselves, HBO or the thousands of people who worked on Thrones to criticize anything about it," which seems like a sound policy to me. And there remain fans out there who basically interpret any word out of Benioff and Weiss' mouths as evidence of their malicious vendetta against Game of Thrones and art in general, so it's probably wise to avoid weighing in on anything more substantive.
3 Body Problem, a new sci-fi show from these guys, premieres on Netflix on March 21.
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