Cutting pages from the scripts, due to either budget, weather, or a lack of time, had an unintended consequence: HBO’s supposedly epic hour-long drama series was making sitcom-length episodes.
BRYAN COGMAN: We discovered that when you cut a page from a script, you’re cutting a minute of screen time. So if you cut enough pages, your episodes will come in at thirty minutes. Episodes three, four, and five were coming in at only half an hour.
GINA BALIAN (former vice president of drama at HBO): It was late in the process, you’re thinking you’re almost done, and then you realize your episodes are short. And the way the cast was scheduled meant they weren’t all still there. We also didn’t have every set at our disposal. So the producing team said: “You’ve got these actors, these sets . . . what can you do?”
BRYAN COGMAN: As a result, we wrote all of these new scenes that ended up defining the style of the show. They were these wonderful, lengthy [conversations between two characters, or “two-handers”], because we needed scenes that would fill the time, use our series regulars, and use our existing sets, but not cost money or take too long to shoot. As a result you get scenes like the one with Robert and Cersei. If that problem hadn’t happened, I don’t think we would have had as rich and successful of a show.
The quiet episode five scene between Robert and Cersei was a six-minute showstopper depicting a royal marriage in ruins. The scene was not in Martin’s novel, as his books employ a structure where each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a specific character and neither Cersei nor Robert was a “viewpoint character” (though Cersei becomes a viewpoint character in the later books).
“I felt something for you once, you know,” Cersei told Robert. “Was it ever possible for us? Was there ever a time, ever a moment?”
“No,” Robert replied. “Does that make you feel better or worse?”
“It doesn’t make me feel anything.”
The scene was also one of the first to prove that Thrones could deliver intimate, character-driven moments on par with any “serious” drama.
DAVID BENIOFF: There are lots of scenes over the season that came from that “what if” process. George created this world that’s so fully fleshed out and dimensional that you think about what the people in this story are doing when they’re not in the main line of the plot. Robert and Cersei may hate each other, but they can’t avoid each other 100 percent of the time. Every once in a while they will find themselves alone together, and what will they say?
MARK ADDY (Robert Baratheon): It was a fantastic scene largely because of Lena. My memory of shooting it was terror. I was handed that scene the morning we were shooting the boar hunt. So I’m out there doing the boar hunt while trying desperately to memorize this seven-page scene. They promised they’d break it down into little chunks, but that never happened. We needed to do the whole thing, and again and again. Lena was brilliant and I was just remembering words. It’s a lovely scene. I just wish I had longer to learn it.
LENA HEADEY (Cersei Lannister): The scene had a melancholy low energy, which had to do with these two people being tired of it all—of their marriage. We also shot it at the end of a very long day and were just knackered.
BRYAN COGMAN: And that’s when Cersei really came to life. Up until that point, she’s Ice Queen Cersei as seen through the eyes of our heroes. It really freed us to leave the strict character POV structure of the books and explore these characters and have fun with pairing them up. In some ways, such scenes break all the rules of screenwriting—the rule is that every scene must propel the narrative forward, and most of these did not. But fuck it, that rule’s wrong.
ALAN TAYLOR: What surprised me was how long some of the scenes were. I remember getting cranky with Dave and Dan about scenes that were eight pages of dialogue or thirteen pages walking and talking. I’d beg them to reduce them, and they would always refuse, and then we would shoot and it would be fine. But they’re daunting when you first read them.
Another scene spawned from that last-minute scramble was a three-and-a-half-minute chat between the devious master of coin, Petyr Baelish, and the enigmatic master of whisperers, Varys, in the throne room.
DAN WEISS: You have these two master connivers and, perhaps with the exception of Tyrion, the two smartest guys in the story. It’s like the head of the KGB and the head of the CIA getting together for a coffee break.
CONLETH HILL (Varys): Varys was very enigmatic, always. That’s easy to do. You just play the moment and let people wonder. It’s a very cerebral part. I never fight anyone. I never have sex with anyone. He had a way of speaking in court and council meetings that had a marked difference from when he talked with someone he trusted. Initially, there was talk of Varys being a master of disguise, which we never did. I thought it was going to be an Alec Guinness or Peter Sellers role or something.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Conleth Hill is such a marvelous Varys. You meet Conleth, he’s nothing like Varys. You can’t even recognize him. He just vanishes into Varys.
DAN WEISS: Aidan almost turned Littlefinger into a mystical embodiment of will to power and thriving on chaos. There’s something so impenetrable about everything that he does that he’s like an onion that you keep peeling away the skins of and there’s never an end to the skin.
Along the way, there were constant discussions over staging even the smallest elements of this new world. One example was a debate between Benioff and Weiss about a scene where blind Maester Aemon was doing a bit of busywork during his chat with Jon Snow at Castle Black.
DAVID BENIOFF: You see [Maester] Aemon chopping meat. . . .
DAN WEISS: He’s chopping meat. Why can’t a blind guy chop meat?
DAVID BENIOFF: He can definitely. I just think you would probably have your steward do it. I looked at the dailies, and I called Dan: “Why is this blind hundred-year-old man chopping meat?”
DAN WEISS: The actor doing the chopping, Peter Vaughan, is legally blind. So whatever he was doing, he’s a blind person doing it. I stand behind that.
The first five episodes of the first season solidly established the show’s world and characters. The sixth hour, “A Golden Crown,” written by Jane Espenson, was when Thrones began to take off. Suddenly the show’s individual components were working together as a whole, the narrative pace picked up, and some dark humor seeped in.
One standout sequence was in the mountain castle of the Eyrie, where Tyrion first emerged from the show’s packed ensemble as a particularly likable and sympathetic character. Held captive by Lysa Arryn (Kate Dickie), Tyrion launches into a profane and defiant speech and hires rogue sellsword Bronn (Jerome Flynn) to represent him during trial by combat. The contrast between the practical and unscrupulous Bronn and his opponent—an “honorable” knight weighted down by clunky armor—was a splendid example of Thrones’ brutal pragmatism overturning traditional Arthurian hero storytelling.
DANIEL MINAHAN: Jerome did most of his own work because he wasn’t wearing a helmet. He made the choice not to do that and just hang back like a boxer during the fight.
DAVID BENIOFF: Gemma Jackson, our production designer, did a fantastic job [on the Eyrie set] with very little time and budget. That Moon Door, the level of detail. You see a shot of these two guys turning a wheel, you see the door open, you assume it’s the magic of photography making that happen. But she designed it so the wheel really does open the door.
DAN WEISS: The Moon Door was real enough for Jerome Flynn to have fallen through it and nearly killed himself.
At the conclusion of the sequence, Tyrion happily gives his thuggish jailer Mord a sack of coin. The moment is the first time the audience is shown, not merely told, “a Lannister always pays his debts.”
PETER DINKLAGE: God, that’s a lifetime ago. I loved Bronn the mercenary fighting the Tin Man. You know, when I threw the coin to the jailer, paying his debt? That’s when I really keyed in [to the character]. At first I was like: “Who is this guy? He’s got whores aro
und and has a lot of money. . . .” But when he gives Mord the jailer that tip and the actor made this face . . . that’s who Tyrion is. He’s like a great director, thinking of everything, and will follow through on everything.
The hour also contained one of the show’s best lines, a two-word summation of the tale’s focus on survival and an affirmation of life. Arya’s Braavosi instructor, Syrio Forel, played by British actor Miltos Yerolemou, asked if she prayed to the gods. Arya said she indeed prays to the Old Gods and the new. Forel replied: “There is only one god and his name is Death, and there is only one thing we say to death: ‘Not today.’”
DANIEL MINAHAN: I was concerned when I saw Miltos’s audition as Syrio Forel because he was going too “big” in his performance. Then I realized he was a self-dramatizing character. He’s theatrical, like a showman. I thought they had a great chemistry together.
DAVID BENIOFF: I was recently at dinner with my wife and my parents. My mom, who’s eighty-two, asked: “Who wrote [‘Not today’]?” For a minute I couldn’t remember. I was like, “Oh, I think that was in the books.” As I said that, I’m like, “Wait a second. . . .”
DAN WEISS: Take credit, especially for your mom. There was a version of that scene in the first draft written by Jane Espenson, which didn’t have that line.
DAVID BENIOFF: Then Dan did a really good rewrite. It just had a different ending. Then I said, “Oh, I have one idea for something.” I remember thinking, “Dan better not critique this or I’m going to be mad.” And you said, “Dude, I think that’s pretty good.”
DAN WEISS: That’s better than pretty good.
DAVID BENIOFF: I don’t remember what religious or quasi-religious impulse led to that line. I guess it’s sad that the line I’m most proud of writing was from the first season.
The following episode also had standout scene, which introduced the imperious Tywin Lannister. Actor Charles Dance skinned a stag (which happens to be the sigil of House Baratheon) while simultaneously dressing down his son Jaime.
DANIEL MINAHAN: We weren’t going to make the mistake they made with cutting open the deer’s belly in the first episode. The producers got us two stags that were already dressed from a butcher and put rubber entrails inside of them. So what Charles had to do was go through the motions. I asked Charles if he’d like to meet with the butcher, and he said, “No, I’ve done this before.” Okay, wow. They showed him once, and he was impeccable.
LIAM CUNNINGHAM (Davos Seaworth): From an acting point of view, you’re doing a two-to-three-page speech that gives your entire reason for being in the show, while also informing your incredibly arrogant son that he’s not doing his job properly. To explain everything about your character while you’re skinning a deer, most actors would not pull that off. He did it with a style and elegance that makes you completely understand the motivations of everything he did.
DANIEL MINAHAN: It was written beautifully so that you understood Tywin right off the bat, but not in a declarative way. It also completely humanized Jaime. We saw him as this little boy who was damaged by this guy. It was one of those scenes where you think, “Okay, we’re firing on all pistons here.”
The production assembled rough cuts of the early episodes, which began to circulate among the writers and HBO executives.
DAVID BENIOFF: You’re doing all this work and have no idea if it’s just gonna sink into the ocean without a trace.
MICHAEL LOMBARDO (former HBO programming president): We started seeing dailies. The journey to King’s Landing, the scenes with Sansa and Joffrey, were so moving. It felt like something I hadn’t seen before. The production value was coming through. It didn’t look like something that was less than $100 million films. You started to feel like there was a confidence building. It started to feel like this was going to work.
TIM VAN PATTEN: For me, the scene that defined the show, the one that was the most informative for me, was when Ned executes the deserter—it gave you a lot of valuable information about who you were dealing with in the Starks. That code of honor and making Bran watch it. And we caught a beautiful day on the hillside.
BRYAN COGMAN: I knew it was working when we got back a rough cut of episode two. Jon says goodbye to Arya and gives her Needle. Jon says goodbye to Robb. Catelyn gives Jon that look of loathing. And it culminates with a scene of Ned telling Jon, “The next time we meet, we’ll talk about your mother.” At the end of that I was crying and realized, “Okay, we’ve got a show.” Because I knew even then that ultimately the show is about this family, a family that has been split apart, and finding a way to bring all that together again. For me, that was always the core. And you feel that they were a family with a history even though you only see them together for an episode and a half. That’s enough to sustain you so that when you fast-forward to season six and Sansa and Jon run to each other and embrace, you’re weeping—even though Sansa and Jon never had a previous scene together! It’s because the Starks at Winterfell were so well established in those opening episodes.
Even the show’s toughest critic was impressed. Craig Mazin, the producer who famously told the showrunners they had a “massive problem” after seeing the original pilot, later recalled on the Scriptnotes podcast: “I said to [Benioff], ‘That is the biggest rescue in Hollywood history.’ Because it wasn’t just that you had saved something bad and turned it really good. You had saved a complete piece of shit and turned it into something brilliant. That never happens.”
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: The first finished thing I saw was the scene between Arya and Ned. He’s saying, “You’ll grow up and you’ll marry a lord and bear sons and live in a castle.” And she says, “No, that’s not me.” It was straight out of my imagination, and it was perfect. The dialogue was wonderful. It’s not a hugely important scene, but it was important to me emotionally. I thought that I could relax, they were going to do a great job on this. It was my book come to life.
CHAPTER FIVE
Enter the Dragon
Game of Thrones needed a new Daenerys Targaryen. HBO initially thought to replace Tamzin Merchant with another known star and quietly approached some familiar names (such as 28 Weeks Later actress Imogen Poots) before having a casting call open to relative newcomers.
Emilia Clarke, then twenty-two, had recently graduated from drama school and only performed in a few small roles when she got the call from her agent about the opportunity. “The part called for an otherworldly, bleached-blond woman of mystery,” the English actress wrote in The New Yorker. “I’m a short, dark-haired, curvy Brit. Whatever.”
During her final audition, Clarke asked the producers if she could do anything else. Benioff replied that she could do a dance. After all, Momoa had done the haka when trying out for Drogo, and it had worked out pretty well for him. Clarke burst into renditions of the Funky Chicken and the Robot. “I could have ruined it all,” Clarke wrote. “I’m not the best dancer.” As she was walking out, the producers went after her and said: “Congratulations, Princess!”
EMILIA CLARKE (Daenerys Targaryen): I was unemployed when I was cast, but I was coming from three years of really intense training in drama school. We trained twelve hours a day, and I would rate myself—I was the cruelest person I could be to myself. We were trained to do horseback riding and fighting and, well, maybe not the nudity, but we did all of these intense things.
When I started on Thrones the first thing I vividly remember was the [assistant directors] always wanted to know where you were—obviously, you are the product. If you don’t turn up, they can’t do a filming day and you’ve ruined millions of dollars and everyone’s time. They’re like, “Emilia is going to the loo,” and “Emilia is eating a cherry,” and you’re like, “What the . . .”
The other thing was that in drama school you take time to prepare before every scene. I was used to writing all my notes in my book and thinking through my process. I didn’t know how to prepare for a scene while having a conversation with a director—I do now,
just not then. So I would go off and hide to prepare. I would crouch between cars, and I’d hear the ADs being like, “We don’t know where Emilia is! Eyes on Emilia?” I didn’t want anyone to know where I was because no one’s going to let me do my weird preparations that I felt like I needed. I was like: “Don’t fuck it up, don’t fuck it up, don’t fuck it up.”
If the pressure of suddenly being given the lead role in a massive production right out of drama school weren’t enough, Clarke had the added burden of knowing that the first actress cast in her role hadn’t met expectations, and she feared she would get replaced too.
EMILIA CLARKE: From day one, I was like, “Looking silly is not an option.” And the only way to not look silly is to just be completely balls-in the whole way. Because I thought if anything’s going to end up looking stupid, it’s going to be because of me, not in spite of me. I was too naive to know [others’ messing up] was even a possibility.
Clarke received reassurance and support from her more experienced scene partners Iain Glen and Jason Momoa.
IAIN GLEN (Jorah Mormont): One of Emilia’s great qualities is she has no idea how good she is, but that also causes her to doubt her ability and causes neurosis. She worries. So I always wanted to be reassuring. She would always want to talk through the possibilities in a scene.
JASON MOMOA (Khal Drogo): Emilia and I got along instantly, like a house on fire. I ran up and gave her a big hug and lifted her up.
EMILIA CLARKE: Jason tackled me to the ground and said, “Wifey!”
The group’s exterior scenes during the first season were largely shot in Malta, which served as Essos (Martin’s Mediterranean-and-Asian-like continent located across the Narrow Sea from the Europe-inspired Westeros). There Momoa had a challenging time on the set as well, since his role required giving a subtle and largely nonverbal performance as the imposing embodiment of primitive masculinity.
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