Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

by James Hibberd

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: He tormented and tortured me. He did it in the evening. He did it at social events. He did it first thing in the morning. He did it when I was outside my trailer.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: Gwen is sharp as a razor and very funny. She’d cut me down, and I’d unsuccessfully try to get back at her.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: He said to me while we were sitting in the truck having our hair done—it makes him seem very unintelligent, he lets himself down—he said, “You look like one of the dogs from Beverly Hills Chihuahua that I watched with my kids.” And I’m all, “Every person involved with this production thinks you’re an idiot.”

  Although when it came to their performances, the duo would get serious. One of their early standout scenes was on a bridge, when Jaime got his hands on a sword and tried to kill Brienne. Their fight was particularly meaningful to Christie, who trained for months to prepare for her first combat scene.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: Nikolaj was already hugely adept at sword fighting. He learned the fight very quickly, maybe in an hour, and went off to Denmark. It took me much longer. Brienne obviously is supposed to have great skills and stamina and energy. So there was a lot of work I had to do. I trained for months; I mainlined protein.

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): We talked for twenty-five minutes about creatine and whether or not you should use it.

  Like many Thrones fights, the sequence wasn’t only about winning or survival but also giving viewers new insight about the characters.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: In the book, the sword fight was sensational because it told the story of the start of this relationship that is so many different things. For Brienne, she’s fighting because she has to. She doesn’t want to kill him. I thought that was very interesting because we’re so used to seeing fights that are about the thrill or achieving power. With Brienne, fighting was always about enacting justice. For Jaime Lannister, it was about asserting status, and Brienne of Tarth was pulling him down from that stage. She was telling him who’s boss.

  The fight also showed their personalities. You saw Brienne was straightforward and steadier, but with great strength. His style was quick, mercurial, and devious. It was an illustration of their characters and their natures and their way of feeling each other out.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: To his surprise, Brienne is not fighting for her life. She’s an honorable woman and made a promise to take him to King’s Landing. It was also a very different fight because I was still tied at my hands.

  DANIEL MINAHAN (director): It had been raining for days, and this beautiful old bridge that we were shooting on—which the art department had covered with turf—became like walking on peanut butter. It was extremely viscous and slippery. So the actors had to navigate that, like fighting on a banana peel.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: I loved every second of it. During that fight I found my inner butch, my strength as a woman—making myself larger and stronger. I felt a strength in my jaw and pushed my jaw forward, and I felt a power in that. I took great pleasure in being physical and not trying to appear dainty or sexual—just being overtly strong and pulling this difficult and irritating man back down to the level of prisoner. Nikolaj and I really got to know each other during that. He said, “God, you’ve worked really hard on this.”

  DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): Gwen was really happy when Nikolaj said, “Can you hit me ten percent less hard?”

  Further down the road, the duo were captured by Roose Bolton’s sadistic hunter Locke. In one of the show’s most jarring scenes, Locke chopped off Jaime’s hand as punishment for trying to bribe him with the Lannister family’s wealth and power. On the day of filming, Coster-Waldau was extremely sick with the flu, which added to his character’s weariness.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: I was just lying down. Finally, I made it on set. I don’t remember much from that scene other than screaming when it was cut off. I looked miserable, and I was. That was one of my few moments of Method acting.

  DAVID NUTTER (director): Nikolaj impressed the hell out of me. He’s into doing it rough and the way it should be, getting in the mud and going for it.

  Perhaps too rough? When filming a scene where Locke kicks Jaime as he’s writhing on the ground, one blow landed so hard that it broke one of Coster-Waldau’s ribs. When asked about the incident, Coster-Waldau shrugged it off.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: He couldn’t see where he was kicking and misjudged the kick.

  Locke brought Jaime and Brienne to Harrenhal, where Roose Bolton (Michael McElhatton) granted the prisoners a respite from their ordeal. In the bathhouse, Jaime alarmed Brienne by joining her in a steaming tub, naked and uninvited. It was key scene from Martin’s A Storm of Swords that Coster-Waldau had looked forward to shooting for years.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: For the first two seasons Jaime is building up to the bathtub scene. I knew that was going to be important for the character to become more than a moral-less, guarded, one-dimensional character—that’s how he survives, using his arrogance and fighting skills and the fact he’s a Lannister.

  BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): We went deep into the night shooting that. It turns out shooting in a bathtub is kind of hard. And the actors’ being vulnerable like that—they both didn’t have any clothes on, and they had to go to very emotional places during a long scene that took a lot of coverage.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: It was one of the best days on Thrones. Both for myself and for Gwen. It was a long day and you’re in the water and there’s a lot of obstacles.

  ALEX GRAVES (director): I said to David and Dan at the time: “Jaime and Brienne are falling in love, right?” They always gave you as little information as possible. They said, “Yeah, but they don’t know it.”

  At the start of the scene, Jaime was his usual rude self to Brienne. Then, after one insult too many, Brienne stood up in the tub to face him, exposing herself.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: When Brienne stands up naked in front of him, it’s an act of defiance. It isn’t at all gratuitous. She’s angry, she wants to get out of there, but he’s in the way. In that moment she realizes the power of her womanhood without the armor, without the fighting, without killing anyone; that she’s opposite this man that she has such a complex relationship with. He has saved her from being brutally raped, and she still cannot understand him. And he pushes her in that moment.

  So many parts of my life that I’ve struggled with, that so many millions of others struggled with—about being an outsider, about feeling ugly, about having to overcome looking different to other people. She overcomes her own issues about her own femininity and vulnerability and gender and finds the power of not only what it means to be a woman but who she is as a woman. After that, nothing is the same again.

  ALEX GRAVES: Jaime and Brienne have every reason to hate each other, but they can’t get around the respect they have for one another. It’s a great, sexless story about who people are. Jaime is affected by a woman who is like himself instead of being like Cersei, the only woman he’s ever known. So the person who is overwhelmed in the scene isn’t Brienne but Jaime.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: He’d never met anyone like her. He saw himself in her. His whole life was about secrets and not being able to trust anyone.

  Brienne’s reaction caused Jaime to do something we’d never seen him do before: apologize. Jaime then revealed to a stunned and speechless Brienne the true backstory of his most infamous act—killing the Mad King—and how he saved the populace of King’s Landing by betraying his Kingsguard oath. Both characters were doing the one thing they found most difficult in the world: for Brienne, being physically vulnerable; and for Jaime, being emotionally vulnerable.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: He has this pride where he’s refused to talk about what he feels is the immense injustice of what’s happened to him with the Mad King. His pride has prevented him from saying, “By the way . . .” Finally, we see him open up.

  ALEX GRAVES: We did a very long, slow push in
on him during that speech, but the camera crane started making this horrible wheezing noise like every ten seconds as the camera moved in. It didn’t do it in rehearsal; it was so evil. Nobody could figure out how to make it stop. Nikolaj said, “I don’t want to loop this scene later, so let’s go for it.” Nikolaj learned the pattern of the sound and acted around it. This was really an actor going, “I’m going to do this, and nothing is going to stop me.”

  BRYAN COGMAN: I distinctly remember the take of him yelling, “By what right does the wolf judge the lion?” It was one of those transcendent moments where the actor just disappears.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: When I think about it retrospectively, I was incredibly lucky to work with Nikolaj. He empowered me as an actor, and he never made me feel insecure or insignificant because of my lack of experience, and certainly never because of my gender. I was treated as an equal even though he was the actor with a bigger role and more experience. He recognized that I worked hard, and that made me unafraid to push him too. It was all incredibly enjoyable because—and I have to swallow here because a bad taste just came into my mouth—he’s actually very talented.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Red Wedding

  There were so many visceral and existential horrors compressed into the final moments of the season-three episode inconspicuously titled “The Rains of Castamere.”

  There was the death of Robb Stark, the likable hero and avenging son of Ned Stark. Robb was a handsome leader who won every battle yet lost his life for what seemed like a forgivable mistake (reneging on his pledge to marry Walder Frey’s daughter). There was the death of Robb’s mother, Catelyn, the Stark family’s wary matriarch, who was still grieving the death of her husband (as well as, she mistakenly believed, the deaths of her sons Bran and Rickon). Catelyn was forced to witness Robb’s murder and melted down in rage and anguish before being killed too. There was the death of Talisa Stark, Robb’s healer wife, who was gruesomely stabbed in her pregnant belly. There was the fact the sequence took place during the traditionally safe harbor of a wedding, an occasion we associate with our own family, friends, and joyful memories. And it was a betrayal too. The Starks were killed not by their enemies but by people they thought were their allies. There was also Robb’s direwolf, Grey Wind, stabbed whining and helpless in his crate. And there was the tragedy of Arya, who, having journeyed so far, discovered just outside the Frey castle that even more of her family were now dead.

  The Red Wedding was horrifying for all those reasons, and then the writing, performances, and foreboding direction by David Nutter maximized its impact. From the moment Walder Frey’s musicians began to play the ominous strings of the Lannister anthem “The Rains of Castamere” to the moment Catelyn’s throat was cut was only about six minutes, yet it stays burned in your memory forever. “It’s awful and horrible and everything the sequence needed to be,” wrote The A.V. Club’s Emily Todd VanDerWerff after the episode aired, “and it marks a new high watermark for the series.”

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): I knew [I’d kill off Robb Stark] almost from the beginning [of writing the first book]. Not the first day, but very soon. I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense. I killed Ned because everybody thought he’s the hero and, sure, he’s going to get into trouble, but then he’ll somehow get out of it. The next predictable thing is that his eldest son will rise up and avenge his father. Everybody is going to expect that. So [killing Robb] became the next thing I had to do.

  The Red Wedding was based on a couple real events from Scottish history. One was a case called the Black Dinner. The king of Scotland was fighting the Black Douglas clan. He reached out to make peace and offered the young Earl of Douglas safe passage. He came to Edinburgh Castle, and they had a great feast. Then at the end of the feast, [the king’s men] started pounding a single drum. They brought out a covered plate and put it in front of the earl and revealed it was the head of a black boar—the symbol of death. As soon as he saw it, he knew what it meant. They put them to death in the courtyard.

  The larger instance was the Glencoe Massacre. Clan MacDonald stayed with the Campbell clan overnight, and the laws of hospitality supposedly applied. But the Campbells arose and started butchering every MacDonald they could get their hands on.

  No matter how much I make up, there’s stuff in history that’s just as bad, or worse.

  DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): In the book, when the band started playing “Rains of Castamere,” you knew something bad is going to happen. It’s the strongest physical reaction I’ve ever had to reading anything. I didn’t want to turn the page.

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): The Red Wedding was the thing we always told ourselves that if we got to that moment, and if we did it right, did it justice, then [the show would] be in a pretty good place. The energy that it injected into the story would be enough to get us through to the end of the show.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Robb’s wife in the show was maybe the first major departure from the books. David and Dan changed her backstory completely. In the show, Talisa is a healer from Volantis and very strong willed. In the books, Robb marries Jeyne Westerling, a daughter of a Lannister house he met while campaigning in the west. It’s a Florence Nightingale thing where he was wounded and she nursed him back to health.

  Also, Jeyne is still alive in the books. My version of Robb was: “Yeah, it’s going to be dangerous going to the wedding, I don’t think I’ll take my wife with me, they’re going to hate her, she’s the one I married instead of one of their daughters. I’ll keep her at Riverrun with my uncle guarding her.”

  RICHARD MADDEN (Robb Stark): I read [the books] season by season. I didn’t want to preempt where Robb is going. But a thousand people spoiled it for me before I had a chance to pick up the third book. I also made the fatal flaw of googling. So that reinforced what people were hinting, saying something terrible was going to happen and giggling.

  MICHELLE FAIRLEY (Catelyn Stark): I knew what was coming. It’s something that anyone who’s read the books will talk about, so people took great delight in knowing. There’s something incredibly dramatic and brutal about the Red Wedding, the shock of it. I met somebody who read it on the plane and they were so heartbroken they left the book on the plane. For an actor to be given that part to play, you want to grab it and go straight into it.

  OONA CHAPLIN (Talisa Stark): I knew it was going to deviate from the books. I also knew I was going to come to a demise at the end of season three. I was praying for a cool death, and when I read [the script], I was like, “Fuck, everyone dies!” But what it was on the page was nothing compared to what it was like on the day of shooting.

  MICHAEL MCELHATTON (Roose Bolton): In the books, Roose is a much more obvious bad guy. In the show he played his cards close to his vest, so the audience wasn’t sure. He was a sounding board for Robb for his battles. But Robb wasn’t taking Roose’s advice and things weren’t going well for his family, or for the Lannisters, so he decided to get rid of him.

  DAVID NUTTER (director): The most important part was the surprise element and making sure the audience was involved with the story. And the blocking was important. I spent several weeks sitting in preparations with a blank piece of paper doing schematics, figuring out the blocking. One Saturday morning, I felt like I cracked it and put it up on a white chalkboard, like how a football coach would explain stuff to his team. I said [to the producers], “This is how I think the tables should be, this is where we should put our heroes. . . .”

  MICHAEL MCELHATTON: When I saw the room I was stunned by it. It looked like a Vermeer painting. It was smaller than you expected and the ceiling was lower, but the lighting was extraordinary. The Red Wedding had a very unique feel compared to any scene in the entire series.

  The sequence at the Twins—the Starks meeting Walder Frey, Edmure Tully’s wedding, and the fateful dinner—was filmed over the course of a week in Belfast.

  MICHELLE
FAIRLEY: We were very fortunate. We had a week to shoot the whole wedding sequence and did it chronologically as well. So every day we edged closer to the slaughter.

  DAVID NUTTER: Pretty chronological; you can’t do it too chronologically, but I made sure that the most powerful points were near the end of the shoot. These are beloved characters that everybody loved being around. You want to build up the emotional journey of the sequence.

  OONA CHAPLIN: We had become such a family. I hadn’t clocked that the end was nigh. I was in quite happy disbelief for all the scenes leading up to it.

  RICHARD MADDEN: We had put it out of our minds. Then I’d go off to Croatia and [a crew member would] say, “Oh, this is the last time I’ll see you on this show.”

  DAN WEISS: When it came time to shoot it there was so much pressure. We had gotten to it, which was great, but given where the show was at the time [in terms of its budget], it was a very complex thing to shoot and get right.

  DAVID BRADLEY (Walder Frey): I liked the script not just because it was so appalling, but it had this vein of dark humor in it. There was Walder’s welcoming speech he gave with the bread and the salt. He was so friendly and making everybody feel at home. I just knew underneath all that he could not wait to get his revenge.

  RICHARD MADDEN: It was challenging to not hint at anything [in my performance] even though I know it’s coming, especially with Catelyn knowing what the Freys are. We had to hint the Freys aren’t good guys but hopefully kept the element of surprise.