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For my mom, who read the stories
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Finding Westeros
CHAPTER ONE
A Dream of Dragons
CHAPTER TWO
Casting Tales
CHAPTER THREE
“You Guys Have a Massive Problem”
CHAPTER FOUR
“My Book Come to Life”
CHAPTER FIVE
Enter the Dragon
CHAPTER SIX
Learning to Die
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fresh Blood
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Battle of the Battle of the Blackwater
CHAPTER NINE
Fire and Ice
CHAPTER TEN
“This Is Going to Be Good”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Red Wedding
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mummer’s Farce
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Go in Screaming”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Purple Wedding
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Trial and Tribulations
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Biggest Show in the World
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Forks in the Road
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Detour to Dorne
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Running on Faith
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Shame . . . Shame . . . Shame . . .”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Romance Dies
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Playing Dead
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Pack Survives
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Magnificent “Bastards”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
All Shows Must Die
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Shipping Out
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A Sort of Homecoming
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Walks and Talks
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Longest Night
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Things We Love Destroy Us
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Many Partings
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
And Now the Watch Has Ended
CREDITS
Written in Ink and Blood
Photographs
Index
PREFACE
Finding Westeros
Hundreds of men are screaming.
The armored soldiers charge forward, howling with rage, their swords and shields clashing, their boots struggling for purchase in the thick mud. Slowly, agonizingly, some of the fighters are pushed back against a looming tower of corpses. The body pile is a mixture of slain men and horses, gorily intertwined like some gothic rendition of hell. In the distance, flayed men burn on crucifixes.
“You are dying!” yells an assistant director. “That’s the main thing to remember, you are dying!”
It’s October 2014. There are six hundred crew members, five hundred actors, and seventy horses in a Northern Ireland field to film the Battle of the Bastards.
At the center of the mayhem is Kit Harington, who plays the reluctant hero Jon Snow. He’s been fighting Bolton soldiers for days, furiously swinging a hefty broadsword at one attacker after another. During one take, he performs a dozen intricately choreographed strikes that he has drilled perfectly into his muscle memory.
Well, almost perfectly. Harington suddenly gets knocked down into the field’s boggy, mudlike soup. Weeks of battle filming have transformed the soil into a foul mix of dirt, horse manure, urine, fake snow, sweat, saliva, and bugs.
The star gets wearily back onto his feet.
“‘Become an actor,’ they said,” Harington groans. “‘Think of all the fame and glory,’ they said . . .”
* * *
—
Watching this battlefield spectacle from the sidelines, I marveled at the audacity of making Game of Thrones.
My journey with the HBO drama series had begun years earlier when I accepted a routine assignment. In George R. R. Martin’s novels, the smallest decision in a character’s life can have the greatest of consequences. But back on November 11, 2008, I had never heard of him.
I was a senior writer working for The Hollywood Reporter when I interviewed a pair of first-time showrunners, David Benioff and Dan Weiss. HBO had just green-lit the duo’s pilot based on Martin’s books, and the show was an . . . adult fantasy drama? What, you mean like The Lord of the Rings?
Not like The Lord of the Rings, Benioff and Weiss explained. No wizards, no elves, no dwarfs—well, maybe one dwarf.
“It’s not a story with a million orcs charging across the plains,” Weiss said, while Benioff added: “High fantasy has never been done on TV before, and if anybody can do it, it’s HBO. They’ve taken tired genres and reinvented them—mobsters in The Sopranos and Westerns with Deadwood. . . .”
My resulting story was utterly routine. The headline—“HBO Conjuring Fantasy Series”—didn’t even include the title Game of Thrones. The idea that TV’s most prestigious Emmy-winning network would take a crazy gamble on an expensive fantasy show for grown-ups was considered the most newsworthy hook.
And that should have been the end of my Thrones journey. But Benioff and Weiss’s intriguing description of Martin’s story stuck in my head. I bought a copy of the first A Song of Ice and Fire novel, A Game of Thrones. Like countless others, I fell headlong into Martin’s daringly original world. Within a few weeks, I finished the third book in his saga, A Storm of Swords, which was the most exciting and horrifying stretch of page-turning twists and turns I had ever read.
I began obsessively covering the progress of HBO’s pilot. Colleagues would ask: Why do you write so much about that one show? I would reply: Because if they can pull off adapting the books—and I don’t think anybody can—it will change television.
By the time the first season of Game of Thrones premiered in 2011, I had moved to Entertainment Weekly, where I embarked on a series of annual visits to the Thrones set. I was in the desert when Daenerys stood outside the gates of Qarth; bared witness to Sansa and Tyrion’s awkward wedding; watched Joffrey suffer his well-deserved demise; was among the crowd for Cersei’s Walk of Shame; trekked on a frozen lake during Jon Snow’s quest beyond the Wall; and paced Winterfell’s ramparts during the climactic Long Night.
Over the years, I grew to admire the cast and crew’s dedication to making the best possible show, a commitment that often resulted in outright suffering. We’re so accustomed to seeing life on movie and TV sets depict
ed as soft and easy: stars lounging between takes in posh RVs, directors riding around in golf carts on sunny studio back lots, a cast of heroes filming against a green-screen backdrop for computer animators to later insert them into fabrications of harsh environments and deadly peril.
The glamorous and comfortable vision of the entertainment world does exist if you’re on a big-budget production in Hollywood filming on a major studio lot. That was never Thrones. The show was unlike any production, film or television, I have ever seen before or since. Working on Thrones was being wet and freezing for eleven hours, night after night, week after week, and learning to accept that sometimes you were going to be utterly miserable in order to get a shot just right. Thrones was being six-foot-six-inch Rory McCann, an actor made even bigger by his character’s heavy costume and boots, whose only way to rest after shooting an exhausting action sequence was to curl up on the hard floor of a tiny utilitarian trailer, his face half-covered in suffocating latex, a space heater making the drafty caravan either too hot or too cold. And while the production sometimes relied on green screen, more often Thrones actors worked on wholly immersive sets that made you feel like you had literally been transported into another world.
By the time the show concluded in 2019, I had written hundreds of stories covering the series. Yet there was much to the making of Game of Thrones that was left untold. What was Benioff and Weiss’s first fateful meeting with Martin really like? What went down during the filming of the show’s unaired original pilot? How did Thrones pull off its first major battle in season two? What happened with the Dorne storyline? Why did the showrunners decide to end the series after eight seasons? What were those grueling fifty-five consecutive nights filming “The Long Night” really like? And hey, why didn’t Lady Stoneheart ever show up?
My list of lingering questions, along with a desire to create a unified story from my decade of experience covering the show, is the reason for this book. Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon includes more than fifty exclusive new interviews with Game of Thrones producers, executives, cast, and crew that were conducted after the series finale. There are also many quotes that were previously published by EW, as well as occasional quotes that were reported in other outlets (which are attributed in the text along the way).
Of course, no single book can capture the entirety of making a production as long-running and complex as Thrones. But it’s my hope that readers will find some fascinating behind-the-scenes stories here about the characters and moments they love the most. Thrones was also, it should be said, controversial—from literally its first episode to its last—and many of those topics are likewise addressed by the show’s producers, directors, and cast (surely not to the satisfaction of all, but you’ll now learn why certain choices were made).
Mainly this book seeks to chronicle the colossal effort that went into making an extraordinary show. There is nothing more rare in pop culture than to build an alternate world so popular, sophisticated, and engrossing that it’s globally embraced as a place almost as real as our own. J. R. R. Tolkien did it with The Lord of the Rings. So did George Lucas with Star Wars, J. K. Rowling with the Harry Potter series, and Marvel with its cinematic universe. Game of Thrones gave rise to a living, breathing world due to the passionate and tireless efforts of thousands of people.
But it’s worth remembering that it all started with one man. . . .
CHAPTER ONE
A Dream of Dragons
Before the Starks and the Lannisters, the Dothraki and the direwolves, before the continent of Westeros had formed and the first dragon had been born, there was a boy whose imagination could not easily be contained.
George Raymond Richard Martin grew up in a federal housing project in 1950s New Jersey. His father was a longshoreman, and his mother worked as a factory manager. He wasn’t allowed to have dogs or cats but was permitted to own tiny dime-store turtles, along with a toy fortress to put them in. His first fantasy story—the first he can remember, at least—was titled “Turtle Castle.” He imagined his tiny reptiles were competing for power and vying for a little plastic throne.
One day, Martin made a shocking discovery: His turtles were dying. Despite his best efforts to keep his pets alive, his heroes still perished. It was a twist he hadn’t seen coming. So Martin began to weave their fates into his fantasy. Perhaps his turtles were killing each other off in sinister plots?
As the years passed, Martin put his fantasies to paper. He wrote monster stories and sold them to other kids for a dime apiece. He fell in love with comic books. He later sold short stories to pulp magazines, and then penned sci-fi and horror novels.
In 1984, Martin moved to Hollywood and landed a job writing on CBS’s reboot of The Twilight Zone. Martin’s first aired episode was, as fate would have it, a fantasy tale about medieval knights and magic. “The Last Defender of Camelot” was an adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s short story about Sir Lancelot living in modern times. The climax is set in an otherworldly version of Stonehenge, where Lancelot fights an enchanted suit of armor—a silent mountain of a warrior called the Hollow Knight.
In Martin’s original script, Lancelot and the knight fought on armored horses, but that idea was deemed unworkable by the show’s line producers. “They told me, ‘You can have Stonehenge or you can have horses,’” recalled Martin. “‘But you cannot have Stonehenge and horses.’ I called my friend Roger Zelazny to pose the question to him. He sucked on his pipe a minute and said, ‘Stonehenge,’ and so it was. They fought on foot.”
Undeterred, Martin moved on to another CBS fantasy show, 1987’s Beauty and the Beast, where his scripts continued to bump up against the network’s creative limitations. “Counting how many times we could say ‘damn’ or ‘hell,’ telling us a corpse’s makeup couldn’t be ‘too horrific,’ eliminating a news report on a TV in the background because it might be ‘too controversial,’” Martin said. “Bullshit changes, sheer cowardice, afraid of anything that was too strong, anything that anyone might be ‘offended’ by—those [restrictions] I hated and railed against.”
Martin grew frustrated, disillusioned. He returned to writing novels full-time in 1991 and a couple of years later he had an idea for a fantasy story—a “reaction,” he once dubbed it, to his years spent writing for television. It was a sprawling epic like J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a saga that Martin adored, except Martin’s tale was inspired by actual European historical events such as the Wars of the Roses and reflected the true brutality of the Dark Ages. The first book, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996. Sales were, as Martin later wrote on his blog, “nothing spectacular.”
In rapid succession, Martin followed up with two more books in the saga. Their popularity spread by word of mouth, enthralling an ever-growing fandom with a complex story that shattered the fantasy genre’s long-held rules. Beloved heroes died horribly, loathsome villains became strangely sympathetic, the wise and cunning were toppled by the slightest procedural error, and the power of magic was considered unreliable at best.
Along the way, Martin threw in all the horses and castles and sex and violence he wanted. This wasn’t the story of one fantasy kingdom but seven! Each realm had its own distinct history, leadership, and culture (plus there was a whole other continent of diverse cities across the Narrow Sea). There were more than two thousand named characters, a figure that doubled the count from Tolkien’s saga. Plus there were massive battles—one involved four armies, tens of thousands of soldiers, and hundreds of ships. Even meals in Westeros could be extravagant, such as a banquet that included seventy-seven distinct courses. Often such feasts were lavishly described (“elk roundels with blue cheese, grilled snake with fiery mustard sauce, river pike poached in almond milk . . .”). The books’ adult content was equally voluminous, with shocking acts of torture, rape, and incest. Martin penned paragraphs that single-handedly would have consumed an entire season of a network TV show’s budget, gotten a show kicked off the ai
r, or both.
He called this epic A Song of Ice and Fire.
* * *
—
Hollywood took notice. By the early 2000s, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was blowing up the box office. Then, in 2005, Martin’s fourth installment in his saga, A Feast for Crows, debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list (“A fantasy realm too vile for hobbits,” declared the Times). Martin’s novels made the rounds among agents and producers. His phone rang with offers of easy money and silver-screen glory.
Martin, then fifty-seven and enjoying a quiet life in Santa Fe, was wary. . . .
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): The Peter Jackson movies were big. Everybody was looking for a feature fantasy series for films. Everything was being optioned. I started [A Song of Ice and Fire] thinking it couldn’t be filmed. I was like: “How are you going to make a feature out of this that’s two and a half hours? You can’t get it all in.” Jackson took three movies to do Tolkien’s books, but all three of Tolkien’s books were as long as just one of mine. How are you going to do this?
The answers I got back were not ones I wanted to hear, like: “[Fan-favorite Stark bastard] Jon Snow is the central character, we’ll focus on him and cut the rest away.” Or they pitched, “We’re not going to cut anything, we’ll keep it all, but we’ll just make the first film and then make more if it’s a big hit.” Well, what if it’s not a big hit? You’re saying it’s going to be The Lord of the Rings, but what if it’s more like Philip Pullman’s [failed 2007 His Dark Materials adaptation The Golden Compass]? You make one movie, it bombs, and then you have a broken thing. No. I wasn’t interested in anything like that.
Martin’s literary agent sent copies of the Song of Ice and Fire novels to David Benioff, a thirty-five-year-old novelist and screenwriter, and suggested he might consider trying to adapt them for a feature film. Benioff was an up-and-comer in the industry, having penned the acclaimed 2002 crime thriller 25th Hour, along with the screenplays for the films Troy and The Kite Runner.
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