Eight chapters into reading A Game of Thrones, Benioff was stunned when seven-year-old Bran Stark—who had just witnessed an act of incest between the queen of Westeros and her brother—was mercilessly shoved out a tower window. A few hundred pages later, when Martin killed off the book’s main character, the honorable and heroic Ned Stark, Benioff phoned his friend and writing partner, Dan Weiss.
Weiss, thirty-four, had met Benioff a decade earlier while the two were studying literature at Trinity College Dublin. They’d bonded over things like Irish literature and “trying to find a functional gym in Dublin in 1995,” as Weiss told Vanity Fair. Weiss was an author as well, having published his debut novel, Lucky Wander Boy, in 2003. Benioff asked Weiss to read Martin’s books “to make sure I wasn’t crazy.”
“We’d been reading fantasy books since childhood and never encountered anything as good as what George had written,” Benioff said.
Benioff and Weiss, like others before them, wanted to adapt A Song of Ice and Fire. But they quickly ruled out making the books into a movie, deciding instead that only a TV series could capture the scope of Martin’s narrative. At least, the duo hoped it could—neither had ever worked on a TV show before.
Martin agreed to meet Benioff and Weiss for lunch at the Palm Restaurant in Los Angeles to hear their pitch. The meeting lasted four hours and would ultimately produce a pop-culture dragon: the biggest global television phenomenon of the twenty-first century. Yet it all might have been derailed by Martin asking a single unexpected question.
DAN WEISS (showrunner): We were nervous. When you start working in Hollywood, every meeting is nerve-wracking because you feel if you don’t do it right it’s the last meeting you’re ever going to have. I had gotten long past that. You get used to meetings, and most never amount to anything. But this felt like the first meeting I’d ever taken all over again because we knew this was a one-of-a-kind opportunity and if we didn’t get this job we’d never have a chance to work on something like this again, because nobody had ever seen anything like this before. There was one keeper of the keys, and that was George. If George didn’t say yes, all of our dreams were dead in the crib. So we were under pressure to get it right.
DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): Part of the meeting was talking about where George came from and the science fiction writers he knew. Part of it was talking about his books and our passion for them, for him to see that we had really read them. Having worked in Hollywood before, George knew about people who read [a synopsis of a book] and then say, “Oh, this could work as a Lord of the Rings knock-off.” The fact we read the books and could speak to them with some degree of knowledge I think meant something to him.
DAN WEISS: When converting to Judaism, the rabbi’s job is not to convince you to convert but to talk you out of it. There was an element of that with George explaining to us that the reason he left television to do full-time writing was to write things you couldn’t produce. George told us about the horses and Stonehenge. He said: “My imagination is bigger than ‘the horses and Stonehenge’; I want Stonehenge and the horses and another twenty Stonehenges and another million horses.” He wrote the books to use the entirety of his imaginative capacity and wrote it almost intentionally to be unfilmable.
DAVID BENIOFF: George created a world so rich that you’re coming into the story 95 percent of the way into it. So much happened in the past—like the Targaryen invasion of Westeros—and you need to understand that stuff in order for the current story to make sense. Books have a more elegant way of putting backstory in. On television, you either do a flashback or boring exposition. So one of George’s questions was: “How are you going to let the audience know all this stuff that’s so crucial?” I don’t remember what our answer was. We probably came up with some bullshit.
DAN WEISS: In the course of making the show, you develop your approach to those things. But looking back on it, the history he built, even if you take out 90 percent, it’s like the scaffolding on a building. You don’t see the scaffolding after you take it away, but the fact it was there is what makes the building look right. You feel that 90 percent of history through the 10 percent that’s on-screen. There’s this overarching sense of backstory and connection and logic to why characters feel the way they feel about each other. It’s never just people fighting because it’s dramatic.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: They were very persuasive. They loved the books and wanted to adapt the books to a different medium, not change them or “make it their own.” I hate that in Hollywood, when I go in pitching a book and meet with writers and they’re like, “Here’s my take on it.” I don’t want your take on it! Don’t reimagine it, don’t make it your own, just adapt it.
I told them, “I want a faithful adaptation. I don’t want it to be one of those things where you take a title and write a whole new story.” And I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to be a producer on it and write some scripts. “And it can’t be for a [traditional broadcast network]. I don’t want the sex and violence cut out. A season for each book.” So we were on the same accord.
The meeting was going well. The lunch crowd had long since departed, and the restaurant staff was preparing for dinner. Then Martin asked Benioff and Weiss a question that might have ended their tentative partnership right there. One of the biggest mysteries in Martin’s novels is the secret of Jon Snow’s parentage. The Stark bastard is described as the son of Ned Stark and an unnamed mistress he met during Robert Baratheon’s rebellion against Aerys II Targaryen, “the Mad King.” Martin had scattered clues along the way hinting at Jon Snow’s true identity, and fans had several theories.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I did famously ask them the question: “Who is Jon Snow’s mother?” They said they read the books. I wanted to see if they had really read the books and how much they had paid attention.
DAVID BENIOFF: We were weirdly prepared for that question. We had discussed that the day before. We had just started to talk about it and came up with our theory, which just happened to be right.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: They knew the answer, which was good.
DAVID BENIOFF: After we got the Jon Snow–mother question right, he gave us the backing to try and go out there and sell it.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: It was a strange situation. It’s hard to remember now, but when we sat down, I had way more television experience than David and Dan. I spent ten years in television. I had gone through the ranks from staff writer to a supervising producer. If fate had been a little different I might have ended up a showrunner myself. And here were these two guys who were very talented writers but had never done anything in TV before. So a part of me wanted to do it myself, but I hadn’t finished writing the books. I still haven’t finished the books. I didn’t see that happening.
Pitching Game of Thrones as a television series was the first of many uphill battles the producers would fight to get the show on the air. While the Lord of the Rings films were hits and other parties had approached Martin about making a possible movie, fantasy on television was associated with low-budget, all-ages syndicated fare like Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Martin’s books were very R-rated, and fantasy for grown-ups was a largely untested market. “You talked dragons, you got smirks,” as Harry Lloyd, who played Viserys Targaryen, put it. And even a scaled-down version of A Song of Ice and Fire would be prohibitively expensive. There were only a few networks at the time that allowed adult content and might be able to afford the show.
Benioff and Weiss drafted a confident-sounding (and, it turned out, prophetic) proposal that included lines such as, “People are hungry for Game of Thrones. . . . They will watch it, and keep watching it, and tell everyone they know to watch it, and never stop talking about it at dinner, at work, at home. When we give them this show, they will lose their fucking minds.” In their pitch, the duo promised the show would have “none of the things that can make fantasy feel creaky, corny, or kiddie.”
They tried to
sell their adaptation to three outlets. One potential buyer was DirecTV, which was looking to fund original content but was also considered a rather unexciting option with a limited platform. Benioff and Weiss also pitched Showtime, which was interested, but the CBS-owned cable network was known for modest spending. Said Benioff, “We intuitively knew that even the most expensive Showtime show ever made couldn’t come close to getting this where it needed to be.”
That left HBO, which Martin, Benioff, and Weiss had agreed over lunch would be the ideal home. And if you wanted HBO to buy your pitch, there was one person in particular you had to impress: then–programming president and nineteen-year HBO veteran Carolyn Strauss. The executive’s power at the network, combined with her inscrutable demeanor and penchant for wearing all black, gave Strauss a reputation for being, as Benioff put it, “the scariest person in Hollywood.”
DAVID BENIOFF: We were told, “She’s not going to smile at anything you say, she’s not going to laugh, just be prepared for that.”
CAROLYN STRAUSS (former programming president at HBO; executive producer): The idea [for Thrones] wasn’t something I necessarily gravitate toward. But being an executive is not necessarily about doing everything you like to do.
Benioff and Weiss booked a pitch meeting with Strauss and other executives.
GINA BALIAN (former vice president of drama at HBO): The vibe in the room was very quiet. We were listening intently. The pitch was very similar to the story of the pilot. They walked us through that first hour and ended with the cliffhanger. My mouth was gaping open. The kid was pushed out a window?
DAVID BENIOFF: We talked about how fantasy was the most popular genre there is. Loosely defined, Star Wars is fantasy, Harry Potter is fantasy, and even [superhero movies] are their own kind of fantasy.
CAROLYN STRAUSS: There were a fair number of reasons not to do it. There are many ways a fantasy series can go south. Any show that relies on a mythology that isn’t thought out in enormous detail can go off the rails. You’re maybe good for a season or two and then after that you start running into brick walls. Plus, this was clearly going to be expensive.
DAVID BENIOFF: We said most shows begin only knowing their first season. Because of the work George had done, we had a sense of where this was going for many seasons. Even then we knew—though George’s books hadn’t gotten there—that [exiled heroine Daenerys Targaryen] would come back to Westeros and fight for the throne. We had a good sense of the show five years down the road, and that’s a rare privilege for television.
CAROLYN STRAUSS: The way they told the story in that meeting made it sound much more involved and complex and character-driven than I usually feel from fantasy stories. It was not a story of good vs. evil but characters who had elements of both those things.
DAVID BENIOFF: At one point, Carolyn laughed and we were like, “Oh my God, we’re in! We made Carolyn Strauss laugh.” We felt good by the end of the meeting that they were interested.
GINA BALIAN: This wasn’t your usual HBO show. So after the pitch I ran down to Carolyn’s office: “We’re going to buy this, right?”
HBO agreed to take Game of Thrones to the next step: negotiating with Martin for the rights to A Song of Ice and Fire. This alone ended up taking nearly a year due to legal hang-ups.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: The big sticking point was the merchandising. We didn’t know that would be big going in, but HBO’s lawyers didn’t want to set the precedent of giving away something they hadn’t given away before. I was saying, “I can’t give you everything you want. I already have a video game in the works, a role-playing game in the works. I’ve already given the rights to a guy to make replica coins.” Who knew Game of Thrones replica coins would be a thing? So we were in this endless negotiation of parsing individual items, like, “You can have bobblehead dolls, I get key rings. . . .”
Then came another stumbling block. Strauss, who had become a strong advocate for the show behind the scenes, stepped down from HBO in 2008. Strauss shifted to join Thrones as an executive producer, but regime change at a network often spells doom for titles developed under the previous boss. Somehow, Benioff and Weiss had to convince a new leadership structure led by HBO co-president Richard Plepler and programming president Michael Lombardo to spend at least $10 million on a pilot that was wildly unlike anything else HBO—or any network—had ever made.
MICHAEL LOMBARDO (former HBO programming president): HBO was still coming out of The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood. We were getting questions like, “Why did you not get Mad Men? How come you didn’t pick up Breaking Bad?” We had been the place for all things quality drama and were looking to regain our footing. But Game of Thrones didn’t seem to fall into our category. This didn’t scream “Emmy voters.” This was not a genre embraced by the voices HBO traditionally listened to for drama series. It had a lot going against it.
But Carolyn said, “This is a really good script, you should read this,” and it read like a page-turner. The writing was sharp and clear. You get to Jaime pushing Bran out the window and I was like, “Holy shit, this isn’t like anything I’ve read.” Still, The Lord of the Rings had been out and was done pretty damn well. How do we compete with that? How can this feel, from a production standpoint, as textured and credible? We knew it had to be able to stand next to projects in this genre being done on the big screen, yet with a more limited budget.
Hanging over Thrones was the fallout of another HBO title, 2005’s Rome, an ambitious and compelling period drama co-produced with the BBC that cost a staggering $100 million for its first season. HBO had axed Rome due to low ratings before its second season aired. The network was understandably reluctant to sink tens of millions into another swords-and-shields costume drama when they just had one that didn’t work.
Benioff and Weiss tried to assure HBO executives that Thrones would remain far less expensive than Rome, which, of course, wasn’t remotely true.
DAN WEISS: A story of this scale had never been told within filmed entertainment, to my knowledge. Nowadays it’s economically viable to make a television show at this scale. Back then, it just wasn’t done. HBO had tried with Rome, which was a step in that direction. One thing we felt like we had going for us is we said, “It’s not a symphony, it’s a chamber piece.”
DAVID BENIOFF: The lie we told was that the show was “contained” and it was about the characters.
DAN WEISS: We knew most of the people making the decisions were not going to read four thousand pages [of Martin’s books] and get to the dragons getting bigger and the [major battles]. The show was exactly what we told them it wasn’t. We were banking on them not finding out until it was too late.
MICHAEL LOMBARDO: I’m not sure I ever really believed that. We knew it was a gamble. We were budgeting it and scratching our head whether we should go ahead and green-light this. We were trying to figure out the production challenges.
There was something else going against Thrones as well. Benioff and Weiss had never worked on a television show before (at least, not one that made it past the pilot stage). Typically in such situations a network would bring in a veteran writer-producer to take the lead on the project. But HBO insiders said Benioff and Weiss continually impressed them with their insights during the show’s development process.
CAROLYN STRAUSS: I’d worked with series producers where we forced them to hire other writers. But Dan and David were always confident they could do it, and they were very open to learning what they didn’t know. They’re incredibly fast learners. We would bring in producers or department heads who were more experienced and had a certain conventional wisdom, and time and time again Dan and David would prove their instinct was the right one. Bit by bit, they earned our trust.
In the fall of 2008, the decision of whether to order the Game of Thrones pilot was hanging over the network. Lombardo went to his gym, the Equinox in West Hollywood. As it so happened, Weiss went to the same gym.
MICHAEL LOMBARDO: And I
see Dan on one of the bicycles. He was reading this dog-eared copy of the first book, and it had underscores and yellow highlights [on the pages]. He didn’t know I saw him. And I thought, “We’re going to figure this out. These guys breathe this show in a way that doesn’t happen all the time.” I found that little window into Dan in that quiet moment, that this is what he was doing in his free time. It was such an acknowledgment of everything I suspected about those guys, and it made me determined to figure this thing out.
RICHARD PLEPLER (former co-president and CEO of HBO): You could see they were breathing this. There’s a feeling when great artists are talking about their passion and are immersed in a subject. It’s the same feeling you get when [The Wire creator] David Simon pitches something or when Armando Iannucci pitched Veep or Mike Judge pitched Silicon Valley. I just had that feeling about them.
In November, Benioff and Weiss got the news they had waited three years to hear. HBO had agreed to green-light a pilot for Game of Thrones. The duo was relieved and elated. But before they could celebrate, they wanted to make sure of one last thing.
GINA BALIAN: David and Dan told me, “We can’t have you guys come back to us later and say we can’t kill the lead character because suddenly you really like him.” So when we got the okay to make the pilot I remember running to Mike and barging in and going: “Just double-, double-, double-checking: We’re killing the lead and there’s dragons.”
CHAPTER TWO
Casting Tales
Nothing about making Game of Thrones was easy. When building a new fantasy world on a relatively limited budget, nearly every aspect of production comes with an unprecedented degree of difficulty—starting with the casting.
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