Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

by James Hibberd

  In the episode, Bronn fired a burning arrow to ignite Tyrion’s wildfire trap. The resulting massive green explosion consumed the bulk of Stannis’s fleet and blew away viewers. Finishing the effects by the episode’s air date went down to the very last minute.

  DAVID BENIOFF: We were turning in VFX shots on “Blackwater” a week before airing. HBO quality control got the tapes with twenty minutes to spare [before the deadline].

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: When the wildfire explodes, it’s glorious. It’s one of my favorite episodes of the show. Certainly my favorite of the four I wrote [throughout the series].

  CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN: “Blackwater” was a litmus test on whether we could pull things off. We had done something we didn’t think was possible. The confidence that came out of doing it set the tone for the subsequent seasons.

  LIAM CUNNINGHAM: Neil texted me a review from Rolling Stone that said, “This is possibly the best hour of television that’s ever been made.” And Neil, who had never done television before, wrote, “Not bad for a first-timer.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Fire and Ice

  Daenerys, her clothes in tatters, stood at the towering gates of Qarth. The Mother of Dragons had survived a long trek through the expanse of the Red Waste, seeking shelter for the weary remnants of her khalasar. But the city’s pampered leaders refused to let her inside. Emilia Clarke’s stance was firm and defiant, her voice resounding across the desert: “When my dragons are grown, we will take back what was stolen from me and destroy those who wronged me. We will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground. Turn us away and we will burn you first!”

  Showrunner Dan Weiss watched Clarke on a nearby monitor and marveled at the way she channeled the power of a fearsome Dothraki leader. “She looks really tough,” Weiss said of the petite, five-foot-two actress. “I’m a six-foot-tall male, and if I try to stand tough I look like an asshole. We really need to sell that if she doesn’t get into the city she’s truly fucked.”

  It was September 2011 and Clarke’s third day performing in a sun-drenched quarry in Croatia. The actress’s long, dark hair was smushed into a bald cap glued onto her head, and then a tight blond wig was affixed on top of that. Standing in the heat, hour after hour, Clarke felt like her skull was baking. After filming the scene, the actress bowed out of a scheduled interview due to “heatstroke.” As Clarke cheerfully explained later that week, “Oh, the other day? I just had a bit of a ‘can’t cope with the heat’ moment. . . .”

  Clarke wouldn’t reveal the real reason behind her exhaustion for another eight years. After filming Thrones season one, she had suffered a brain hemorrhage at a gym in London. “I immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain,” Clarke wrote in The New Yorker. As she was rushed to the hospital, Clarke recalled lines of Daenerys Targaryen’s dialogue to try to calm herself. The actress underwent emergency surgery and for several days couldn’t even remember her own name, let alone speeches in Dothraki.

  Somehow, just weeks later, Clarke returned to work on Thrones despite still having a second growth on her brain that a doctor said might—in theory, though it was unlikely—“pop at any time.” Day after day on set, Clarke’s performance gave no indication of her fatigue, fear, and pain.

  EMILIA CLARKE (Daenerys Targaryen): It was crazy intense. We are in the desert in a quarry in like ninety-degree heat, and I had the consistent fear that I was going to have another brain hemorrhage. I spent a lot time just being like: “Am I gonna die? Is that gonna happen on set? Because that would be really inconvenient.” And with any kind of brain injury it leaves you with a fatigue that’s indescribable. I was trying so hard to keep it under wraps.

  BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): Only a very select few people knew about that. I was completely unaware. I heard a little bit that she had some problems between seasons, but nothing to that extent. And I had no clue while we were shooting.

  ALAN TAYLOR (director): We were afraid for her. She’s so brave, because it never affected her commitment to the work.

  EMILIA CLARKE: If I had called my doctor, he would have been like, “Dude, you just need to chill out.” But I still felt blind fear, and the fear was making me panic, and the panic was leading me to feel like I’m going to pass out in the desert. So they brought in an air-conditioned car for me—sorry, planet.

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): It was terrifying because this amazing, sweet, wonderful human being came this close to not being around anymore—this person we loved so much after just one year. Obviously you need to make the show, but the important thing was making sure she was in a safe situation. You ask yourself: Is she as safe doing this show as if she was not doing it? If she was home, sitting on her couch? She was so gung-ho, the main thing for us was making sure she wouldn’t put herself [in dangerous situations]. She would say: “Yeah, I just had brain surgery and if I need to gallop on a horse down a mountainside, I’ll do it.” You would have to tell her no because she would never say no.

  EMILIA CLARKE: In all of my years on the show, I never put self-health first, which is probably why everyone else was worrying, as they could see that. They didn’t want to work me too hard. I was like: “Don’t think I’m a failure; don’t think I can’t do the job that I’ve been hired to do. Please don’t think I’m going to fuck up at any moment.” I had the Willy Wonka golden ticket. I wasn’t about to hand that in.

  By the time Clarke started filming season three, she felt considerably better—and was happier with her storyline, as well.

  EMILIA CLARKE: Daenerys’s storyline was a little funky in season two—“the tricky second album” is what I like to call it. Then in season three she was coming into her power and I felt like I was coming into my power. So season one, I was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing”; by season three, I was like, “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  The season contained one of the most critical moments for her character: Daenerys’s gaining an Unsullied army. The sequence in Martin’s A Storm of Swords is an emotional high point and clever turn of events. Having sailed from Qarth to the Slaver’s Bay city of Astapor in hopes of gaining an army, Daenerys patiently negotiated with the sadistic slave trader Kraznys (Dan Hildebrand), who assumed she didn’t understand his insults spoken in Valyrian, while Kraznys’s translator, Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel), slyly hid his rudeness in an effort to keep the peace.

  Daenerys agreed to give Kraznys a dragon, Drogon, in exchange for an army. But when the exchange was made, Daenerys revealed to the slave trader that she was, quite naturally, fluent in her ancestors’ mother tongue. Daenerys ordered her soldiers, acquired just moments before, to slaughter the city’s slave masters, and unleashed Drogon to torch Kraznys. “A dragon is not a slave,” Daenerys declared. The moment was not merely about trickery, spectacle, or achievement but Daenerys’s trusting her own instincts and playing the game of thrones for the first time.

  EMILIA CLARKE: Up until that moment, Dany relies on everybody else’s opinion to form her own because she didn’t know any better. It’s the biggest risk she’s taken in her life and everyone around her is assuming she’ll give Drogon up—which is ridiculous for the mother of a child. There’s that moment of “Is this going to work or is it not going to work,” whether the Unsullied are going to respect her, and everything hangs in the balance. It’s the moment she becomes who she was always destined to be. There’s a thin line between braveness and madness, and she dances on that line.

  DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): The best kind of surprises aren’t the ones that come out of nowhere; they’re the ones where after you see it you’re asking yourself, “Why didn’t I see that was coming?” I remember reading [that Daenerys was going to give up Drogon] going, “Oh, it’s kind of disappointing that she’s doing this.” When her real plan is revealed I called Dan. It was one of those times when we were like, “We gotta make this fucking show.” It’s a hallmark of a number of scenes in this book, where in retrospect I should
have seen it coming because George had laid out all the pieces; he had given you the clues.

  The budget-straining sequence was shot in Morocco by director Alex Graves, who had to depict a slave uprising and the show’s first major dragon attack using just a few concise shots.

  ALEX GRAVES (director): It’s one of those, “There’s no money to this, but if you pull this off it’s one of the greatest sequences of all time.”

  EMILIA CLARKE: I couldn’t wait to stick it to the man. I had been practicing that speech for weeks in my room.

  DAN WEISS: When we lit Kraznys on fire with the dragon, [special effects supervisor Stuart Brisdon] made a flamethrower on a pole up in the air. They shot this stuntman full in the face with a flamethrower. It was a shocking, powerful thing to watch, even as a stunt.

  The scene concluded with Daenerys looking triumphant as a series of explosions ignited behind her from Drogon’s attack.

  ALEX GRAVES: I came up with what’s been called “the Apocalypse Now shot.” But we were filming in Morocco during the Arab Spring, when transporting high explosives into North Africa was not allowed. I didn’t give up because that image of Emilia was so burned into my brain. So we smuggled the explosives into the country to do it. Emilia stood in front of these fireballs and you could feel the heat and the shock wave from the explosions, and she didn’t flinch.

  EMILIA CLARKE: Iain Glen, who was consistently my mentor, was like, “Darling, come here. Look at how well taken care of you are. All you have to do is stand in front of that and all this shit is happening.” I realized that was all I needed to do. And it felt so good. It felt so electric. It was like everyone who had ever fucked me off in my life, they had them all lined up.

  The sequence also gained Daenerys two allies who would accompany her through the final season and develop storylines of their own: savvy translator-turned-advisor Missandei and stoic Unsullied leader Grey Worm (Jacob Anderson).

  NATHALIE EMMANUEL (Missandei): I was a really big fan of the show, and I had on a number of occasions phoned my London agent saying I really wanted to be on it. Then I saw a breakdown for a character where they specifically detailed Missandei should be of color between eighteen and twenty-three and I was like, “Wait, that’s me!” I phoned my agent, and she was like, “I’ve already seen it, you’ve got an audition.”

  I did a bunch of research on the character and was reading the books as I wanted to be as prepared as possible. Because Missandei was from the Summer Isles, I thought maybe she might speak the Common Tongue with an accent. So I came up with an accent for her, like a [Received Pronunciation, or “posh,” accent*]. My agent said, “No, no, you don’t need to do an accent.”

  So I did the audition once, and casting director Robert Sterne said, “They haven’t quite decided whether Missandei would have an accent or not.” So I was so ready to go and did the accent. It’s a testament to being prepared. I didn’t hear anything for five weeks. When I got the call, I was on my way home from food shopping. I screamed and dropped my shopping and broke a jam jar and cried a lot.

  JACOB ANDERSON (Grey Worm): It was one of the worst auditions I have ever done. The only note I was given was to hold back any emotion. But it was the speech where Grey Worm talks about getting his name and I subconsciously cranked up my emotion because that was exactly what I’ve been told not to do. I couldn’t help getting emotional about what I was saying. I was also self-conscious about my accent. They said, “Don’t worry, you’re not going to speak English.” I’m like, “What?” I figured I’d definitely not gotten that part. To this day I have no idea how I got the job.

  NATHALIE EMMANUEL: I went to a read-through [of the season-three scripts] in Belfast, and I was terrified. I stood in this room while all the cast of the show I’d been watching were coming in. Then [Loras Tyrell actor] Finn Jones—who I’d met before as he’d done a bit on Hollyoaks, a show I’d been on—saw me standing in a corner not moving and asked if I was all right. “I don’t know, kind of overwhelmed.” He was really sweet and helped me find my seat and introduced me to people.

  JACOB ANDERSON: During my first week, I was like, “This could be quite boring playing this stoic character who doesn’t have any thoughts or feelings.” Then Dan said: “Grey Worm is walking trauma. If you imagine a robot built out of trauma, that’s what he is.” I found that a helpful guide to the rest of the show. If you’re someone who has dealt with a lot of trauma, the last thing you want is to be present, because it can be re-traumatizing. Also, my costume was beautifully designed, but there was very little that was practical about it. I could barely walk, which is why I have a slightly funny walk in the show; it doesn’t let up at all.

  NATHALIE EMMANUEL: My first scene was when Missandei was showing her bravery when Daenerys said, “You may go hungry, you may fall sick, you may be killed.” And it ends up with me saying, “All men must die,” and Daenerys says, “Yes, but we are not men.” It’s such an iconic feminist moment in the script, with Missandei giving that small smile. For the character, that’s when she knew she was in safer hands and that this woman was a force to be reckoned with.

  After that shot, David Benioff came up to me and he said, “You’re officially on Game of Thrones,” and it was the best thing anyone could have said to me. My little heart burst.

  JACOB ANDERSON: Somebody later told me Benioff had said when I got cast that I was “good but way too skinny.” But he never told me that! Had somebody told me that I would have worked out.

  NATHALIE EMMANUEL: I was familiar with Jacob’s work in Adulthood and was excited to work with him. We’re the two characters of color in the show, and it’s always great when you have someone around you’ve shared a certain experience with.

  His first scene was when he gets chosen by the officers of the Unsullied army to be their leader and Daenerys says he gets to choose his freedom name. But it’s all in Valyrian. I remember on his first take he delivered this incredible performance and Emilia and I looked at each other like, “Oh, damn, this is amazing.” He delivered the speech with so much brilliance and conviction while saying essentially made-up words. “Whatever you just said, we believe you!”

  JACOB ANDERSON: I remember being in awe of Emilia and Nathalie looking back at me in that scene. I didn’t know anybody and they were really encouraging and friendly and I just needed that. I thought, “If this job is getting to work with these two, this is going to be a good job.”

  NATHALIE EMMANUEL: Jacob and Emilia and I just became this little gang and had so much fun together. Jacob was always aware and conscientious about us two being the only women around, and we loved him because of that.

  The trio of actors became a tight-knit group for the rest of the series, with Clarke often arranging games to keep them entertained during downtime on the set (example: Everybody had to draw an animal in fifteen seconds and then they all compared the results; “We’re like four-year-olds sometimes,” she said).

  One of Daenerys’s season-three companions noticeably changed: The handsome Second Sons mercenary Daario Naharis was played by Ed Skrein in season three, then was switched to Michiel Huisman for seasons four through six. Skrein has previously told reporters the reason was “political.” Insiders contend Skrein’s voice wasn’t quite right for the role and his lines were dubbed over.

  MICHELLE MACLAREN (director): The guy was lovely and talented, it just wasn’t the right combination, and those things do happen. I was impressed how [producers] dealt with it by not explaining anything. They were just like, “Okay, so there’s a different actor but the same character, moving on. . . .”

  While Daenerys gained allies in the desert, Jon Snow was getting captured by the Wildling army in the frozen wasteland beyond the Wall.

  In a storyline that spanned the show’s second and third seasons, Jon Snow infiltrated the Free Folk and posed as a Night’s Watch deserter to learn their plans to invade the south. There he met the wildling Ygritte and, in defiance of his vows, fel
l in love.

  Harington recalled the first moment he met Leslie, whom he would marry in real life seven years later.

  KIT HARINGTON (Jon Snow): I googled Rose when I found out she was playing the part. Then I met her in a costume fitting—so the first time I ever saw Rose she was dressed as Ygritte. She offered me a ginger biscuit, which is very sweet. I was completely enamored. I was also bowled over by her portrayal of the character, which suggested brilliance to me.

  DAVID NUTTER (director): I was the director the first day they met each other. The first scene we shot was when the Night’s Watch take out the Wildlings and he puts the sword to her neck and he’s about to kill her. Kit told me it was the happiest day of his life. You could tell there was a real spark.

  ALEX GRAVES: They had charming, romantic scenes together where nobody got killed—and on Game of Thrones, that’s weird. I don’t think I realized that they were a couple until later. They were so damn happy together. We were like, “Are they dating? They ought to be if they’re not.”

  KIT HARINGTON: I think I started to feel who Jon Snow was in season two. When Jon meets Ygritte, she tests him and puts him in a different ballpark. He’s having to deal with some feisty different entity and she takes the piss out of him and through that you get to see who Jon really is. I don’t think many people mark out season two as a particularly standout season, but for me it was the most special.

  For the north-of-the-Wall sequences, producers wanted a landscape that was more desolate and convincingly wintery than what could be achieved by set-dressing a Northern Ireland location with fake snow and a dusting of CGI. The solution would be the show’s first of several excursions to Iceland, a country that provided some of the show’s most stunning visuals, as well as some of its toughest days.