Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

by James Hibberd

  English actor Kit Harington was also only twenty-two and without any screen credits when he auditioned for the role of Stark bastard Jon Snow. But he was already acclaimed in the London acting community for his starring role in a West End production of War Horse.

  KIT HARINGTON (Jon Snow): Every young male actor in the UK went in for the role. I psyched myself up massively. I remember thinking, “This is one I might be right for.” Actors generally are perceptive to the energy in a room. David and Dan had been sitting in the room all day looking for a person they liked, and you could feel them . . . [leans forward]. After the second audition I thought I was on to something and if I lost it I would be upset.

  To help sort through the audition tapes, the producers enlisted the help of Bryan Cogman, a screenwriter and a Julliard-trained actor whose wife worked as a nanny for Benioff and Peet. Cogman devoured Martin’s novels and became an expert on A Song of Ice and Fire’s mythology. Initially hired as Benioff’s assistant, Cogman would rise through different roles throughout the series as he wrote episodes, supervised on set, and became a co–executive producer. “They gave me way too much responsibility early on, considering I had no experience,” Cogman said. “But you know what? They didn’t either! I think they valued the fact that I was an actor and had some training.”

  BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): This is embarrassing. We were casting ladies for the character that became Ros. At that point the character was just “redheaded and a whore.” One day, David, Dan, and Tom McCarthy weren’t available and I was tasked with auditioning actors for this role. This Northern Irish actress comes in. I was terrified because it was this randy scene and what the fuck did I know? The sides were all these double entendres and the young lady did a nice job but she kept looking at me funny and I didn’t know why.

  I said, “Okay, let’s try one more.” Because I guess we should do more than one? She read it again, and I said, “Okay, that’s great!” And she stood there for a minute and said, “Well, I guess I’ll go now. . . .” The next day Nina Gold calls me and goes, “You didn’t have her strip to her underwear!” She had been waiting to be told to take off her clothes. I guess that’s normal when casting those roles. I felt immense guilt. Later, Esmé Bianco came in and won the role.

  NINA GOLD: We don’t have actors take their clothes off in the audition, I have to say. Though some take them off on their own accord.

  ESMÉ BIANCO (Ros): “The Redheaded Whore” was the character name then, and she was originally just going to be in the pilot. I auditioned in my underwear. They do that because some actresses will say they are okay with doing nudity at an audition but then on the day of shooting will not be okay with it. At the time I was doing burlesque shows and lingerie modeling, so this was like just another day in the office. When the show got green-lit, the producers reached out: “Would you be interested in doing more scenes?” It was George R. R. Martin who said, “Maybe you should give her a name instead of referring to her as ‘the Redheaded Whore’ for the entire season.”

  English actor Joe Dempsie was coming off the provocative UK hit show Skins when he was cast as Robert Baratheon’s abandoned bastard son Gendry.

  JOE DEMPSIE (Gendry): I auditioned for two or three parts before getting Gendry. I initially thought when I wasn’t getting those parts that they thought I was terrible. In hindsight, they identified people they wanted to work with and after that they were figuring out what piece in the jigsaw you are. That we have a bunch of actors that get on so well and have such good work ethics and professionalism is not by chance. David and Dan created that atmosphere. Nobody is bigger than the show. So there was very little ego.

  DAVID BENIOFF: We have a lot of friends who [write on TV shows] and the problems we had to deal with over the years in terms of cast misbehavior was so minuscule compared to what most people deal with. I don’t know if it’s a UK thing or what, but we got so lucky given the size of the cast it’s incredible. We only had like one or two dicks in minor roles.

  NINA GOLD: One actress—who got the part but shall remain nameless—was reading for Robert [Sterne], and to everybody’s great surprise suddenly she straddled him and started trying to take his shirt off. Robert, being a complete trouper, didn’t say, “Stop, cut, how dare you,” and just went with it. I could see Robert’s hair slightly standing on end as he was thinking, “How do I get out of this one?” And didn’t she try to kiss you?

  ROBERT STERNE: Yeah, it’s all about being committed to it, and sometimes they want somebody to hang on to when doing these kinds of scenes.

  But the pilot’s best audition story belongs to British actor John Bradley, who had just graduated from drama school when he got an opportunity to read for lovable yet blundering Night’s Watch conscript Samwell Tarly.

  JOHN BRADLEY (Samwell Tarly): I wasn’t thinking it was one of the most important days in my life. It’s only since then that I see it that way. I had to go to London from Manchester, where I live. So I gave myself four hours to make the two-hour journey, only to find the direct train to London had been canceled. So I had to take this huge detour.

  DAN WEISS: We’d probably seen seven or eight Samwells in person that weekend during a four-day stretch. We had found a guy who was great—and it was not John Bradley. Nina said, “There’s a fellow who’s coming in and his train is late, would you mind waiting?” We’re thinking, “It’s hot up here and we’re kind of hungry. But he took the train from Manchester; we can’t just not see him.”

  JOHN BRADLEY: I’ve always been an overplanner and overthinker. I probably would have overthought myself into distraction and tied myself into knots about the audition if I had time on the train. But I was going at such a breakneck pace I didn’t have time to think.

  DAN WEISS: He ran from the station. Then he found out the elevator was out.

  JOHN BRADLEY: So I ran up three flights of stairs and burst into their office. I was so grateful they didn’t decide to just call it a day. I had to go in completely breathless and with all this nervous energy, which fed into my interpretation of Sam.

  DAN WEISS: He looked like he was ready to pass out. He was drenched in sweat. And within thirty seconds we realized he had just cost this other guy his job, because he was completely perfect.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “You Guys Have a Massive Problem”

  The original Game of Thrones pilot began shooting on October 24, 2009. Filming lasted twenty-six days. But first, the producers had to make a decision: Where, exactly, was Westeros?

  While the series would ultimately film in many countries and locations, the team needed a primary production hub as their base of operations. Picking somewhere in the British Isles made the most sense as the show was inspired by historical wars in what’s now the United Kingdom. Shooting in England and Wales was quite expensive, which left Ireland, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. David Benioff and Dan Weiss were familiar with Ireland, having attended college in Dublin. But its neighbor to the north offered lucrative tax breaks that would offset the show’s production cost. Northern Ireland’s capital city of Belfast also had some existing studio infrastructure and crew, and its surrounding countryside had plenty of rustic filming locations and medieval ruins.

  “Northern Ireland offers a broad array of diverse locations within a short drive,” Benioff wrote in Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones: Seasons 1 & 2. “Windswept hilltops, stony beaches, lush meadows, high cliffs, bucolic streams—we can shoot a day at any of these places and still sleep that night in Belfast.” At the time, Northern Ireland was considered a bold choice, as the country had only recently emerged from a period of urban violence known as the Troubles. Yet picking Belfast was a decision that would define the look of the show, help transform the country’s economy, and provide Thrones with a crew of local workers long known for their rugged fortitude.

  The production set up camp around Belfast’s cavernous Paint Hall studio hangar. The site is on the grounds of the abandoned shipyard tha
t once built the RMS Titanic, and the hall is where White Star Line ships were once painted. The hangar sits on a windy gray corner of the world, with cold, dark water lapping against a rocky shore. A series of tall poles on an adjacent concrete slab mark the outline of the RMS Titanic as an eerie memorial.

  The site was tough to beat, not only as a practical choice but also as an unintended metaphor. The birthplace of what was once the world’s biggest and most lavish ship was about to create the world’s biggest and most lavish TV drama. Yet the show’s first pilot—the production’s maiden voyage, if you will—almost sank the series.

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): It was a frightening time because it was our first time running a production of any scale. And there are many, many moving parts, human and otherwise, that go into any production, especially one of this size.

  Like Martin’s saga, the pilot opened with a trio of Night’s Watch rangers venturing beyond the Wall—a seven-hundred-foot-high border wall made of ice inspired by Hadrian’s Wall (a fortification in England that once marked the border of a Roman Empire province). The Rangers have a fateful encounter with the supernatural White Walkers, an ancient race of winter demons. Only as initially conceived, the White Walkers spoke in their own fictional language, called Skroth, and their costume design wasn’t ready by the time shooting began.

  DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): The original White Walkers looked so terrible. We just punted it.

  DAN WEISS: For the first White Walker, we stuck a guy in a green suit and thought we’d figure out what he looked like later with CGI. Nobody said, “That’s an enormously expensive approach to the problem you have.” The thing to do was come up with [a costume], even if it’s not 100 percent of the way there, and then fix it later with CGI as opposed to coming up with nothing and designing it entirely in CGI. That would have taken half the budget of the pilot just to do that.

  But the pilot’s finished costumes for other roles had problems too. “All the costumes looked brand-new,” Benioff told Vanity Fair. “They all looked like they’d just been made the day before. . . . The costumes needed to look lived-in. This is a period where people weren’t taking their things to the dry cleaner’s. Aside from maybe the queen, everyone’s clothes [should] look dirty and sweat stained.”

  Scotland tourist attraction Doune Castle was used for Winterfell, the seat of House Stark. It didn’t make financial sense to build a Winterfell set from scratch, as the project had not been picked up to series. But Doune had an overly familiar look and was leaned on heavily for the pilot.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): Doune Castle was where they filmed Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The gift shop was selling plastic coconuts.

  BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): Everything was at Winterfell in the first pilot. All the King’s Landing scenes were cut from the script to save money—like Jaime and Cersei and Jon Arryn’s dead body. So we met the Lannisters when they arrived at Winterfell.

  And one of the Starks almost didn’t survive the cutbacks.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: They were doing a faithful adaptation, but I knew they’d have to cut some things. The biggest thing was Dan and David called me up and had the idea of eliminating Rickon, the youngest of the Stark children, because he didn’t do much in the first book. I said I had important plans for him, so they kept him.

  For the youngest actors, being in the pilot simply felt like a thrilling adventure.

  ISAAC HEMPSTEAD WRIGHT (Bran Stark): It was like summer camp. I was ten years old, I was getting to go leave school, go to a place I’ve never been, get put up in a hotel, and play around with swords. The only thing was our hotel stank of sewage—people like Sean and Nikolaj were in this posh hotel and us kids were in this other one.

  For the veteran actors, however, there were worrisome signs that this Game of Thrones thing might not be on solid footing.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU (Jaime Lannister): Nobody knew what they were doing or what the hell this was. During King Robert’s arrival I remember finding the whole thing ridiculous. The absurdity of doing this parallel universe with these very noble men. It’s a very fine balance between being serious and believing it and just being cosplayers. There was certainly not a sense that this was going to be some game-changer for anyone. But we had a lot of fun.

  MARK ADDY (Robert Baratheon): We were trying to establish the rules and order of this new world. In the Winterfell courtyard scene, nobody kneeled when the king arrived in the first pilot. You can’t play being the king. You can’t display “look at how powerful I am.” People have to give you that by showing subservience. It has to be afforded to you by others. In the reshoot, everybody kneeled. It makes a huge difference in terms of establishing who’s in charge.

  LENA HEADEY (Cersei Lannister): I looked like a Vegas showgirl in the pilot—furs and massive hair, like a medieval Dolly Parton. Not that I’m complaining, I loved it.

  BRYAN COGMAN: When we first shot the scene where the Starks find the direwolves—this was the version you never saw—the wonder of what a direwolf was wasn’t coming across. It didn’t seem important enough to the characters. And I’m little assistant Bryan running around the set yelling to anyone who would listen: “These are direwolves! No one has seen these in a million years! This is like seeing dinosaurs! It’s not like finding puppies!” And everyone’s sort of chuckling.

  ESMÉ BIANCO (Ros): I thought it was going to be for a niche audience because it was described to me as a fantasy. So I just had a really fun day on set with Peter Dinklage, who’s a generous actor and charming and sweet. I think our scene was the only scene from the pilot that wasn’t reshot. Nobody had any sense of the magnitude of what was coming.

  CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN (producer): Joffrey had a different haircut. In the original pilot, it was more pageboy cut, slightly pudding bowl–ish, like Henry the Fifth. It wasn’t that it didn’t suit him being a little shit, but it softened the edge. The modern cut in the version that aired gave him more spitefulness.

  DAVID BENIOFF: At first it seemed to us like it was going well, but that was because we didn’t know any better.

  DAN WEISS: As we went on, the cracks turned into bigger cracks, which turned into fissures. You started to feel the wheels coming off by the time we got to Morocco.

  In Morocco, the production staged the sequence where the smug sociopath Viserys Targaryen sells his sister, Daenerys (then played by Tamzin Merchant), into an arranged marriage to the menacing Dothraki warrior Khal Drogo. Except this version shot Daenerys’s wedding at night, among several other differences.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I went to Morocco for Dany’s wedding in the first pilot. I played a Pentoshi nobleman with beard extensions and an enormous hat. I looked like an idiot, but it was fun.

  HARRY LLOYD (Viserys Targaryen): I had a different wig. It was titanium and silver, and it was shorter and a bob. Looking back, it was a mistake. There were consultations: “I’m not like Draco Malfoy, I’m not like Legolas . . . how do we do this?”

  IAIN GLEN (Jorah Mormont): It was a bit ragged and, in some ways, ill conceived, and no one had great conviction. Since the wedding was shot at night, quite a lot of money had been spent on seeing absolutely fuck-all.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: There are a couple of stories. As a wedding gift, Khal Drogo gives Daenerys a silver horse and she rides away. For a moment you think she’s fleeing. Then she turns the horse around and leaps the horse over a big campfire. Drogo is very impressed, and it starts the relationship on a good note. We tried to film this scene. We got a top stunt rider and a top horse, a silver filly, but the filly would not jump that campfire. She got close and then was like, “There’s fire there!” and would turn the other way. We tried to film it a half dozen ways. So the director goes, “Put out the fire and we’ll do the fire with CGI.” They put out the fire and the horse would still not jump the dead fire. It’s a smart horse. It knows it’s not burning now, but it was burning a little while ago! So they had to scr
ap that sequence, which was unfortunate, as it was a bonding moment between Dany and Khal Drogo.

  Then came the filming of the wedding night. In the Emilia Clarke version, it’s rape. It’s not rape in my book, and it’s not rape in the scene as we filmed it with Tamzin Merchant. It’s a seduction. Dany and Drogo don’t have the same language. Dany is a little scared but also a little excited, and Drogo is being more considerate. The only words he knows are “yes” or “no.” Originally it was a fairly faithful version.

  So we’re by this little brook. They tied the horses to the trees and there’s a seduction scene by the stream. Jason Momoa and Tamzin are naked and “having sex.” And suddenly the video guy starts to laugh. The silver filly was not a filly at all. It was a colt. And it was getting visibly excited by watching these two humans. There’s this horse in the background with this enormous horse schlong. So that didn’t go well either.

  The pilot filming wrapped. Benioff and Weiss then presented a rough cut of their pilot to family and friends to get a sense of how the episode was playing. The experience was, to put it mildly, unpleasant.

  DAVID BENIOFF: I showed it to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law and just watched their reactions. You could tell watching their faces that they were bored. It wasn’t anything they said. They were trying to be nice.