MICHELLE FAIRLEY: By the end of the week, I was getting emotional. You know it’s coming and it’s calm and it’s a wedding, but as the week progressed I was nervous and had to remain concentrated. But you have to remain [looking] fooled as well.
MICHAEL MCELHATTON: I was in the makeup trailer, and there was another guy there who I thought was an extra. He introduced himself as Will. I asked who he was playing and he said he was one of the musicians, the drummer. I said, “Why’d they bring in an English musician when there are perfectly good local Irishmen who could play the bodhrán?”—which is the type of drum he was playing. Then I asked, “Are you in a band?” He said, “Yeah, I’m in a band.” “You having any luck?” “Yeah, we’re doing okay.” You know the punch line for this. I asked what his band was called. He said, “We’re called Coldplay,” and I felt like such a dick.
A traditional way to direct the dinner sequence would be to gradually ratchet up a feeling of suspense and danger. Nutter took the opposite approach. The viewer was initially lulled into a relaxed ease. Edmure Tully was relieved to discover his mysterious Frey bride looked sweet and beautiful. Their wedding ceremony was lovely, and then there was the traditional bawdy “bedding” as the newlyweds were carried off to consummate their marriage. Robb and Catelyn, having clashed throughout the season, finally started to get along. Catelyn even warmed up to Talisa, who offered to name her baby Eddard. Robb, Catelyn, and Talisa were coming together as a new generation of the Stark family, feeling happy together for the first time . . . and the last.
DAVID BENIOFF: Robb and Catelyn had been through so much. They’ve been through the death of Ned. They had a major falling out after she released Jaime. They managed to get through that and work back into a loving relationship, and then they have all that taken away.
MICHAEL MCELHATTON: There was a panning shot, looking at the revelers, and David Nutter said, “Give me a smile!” I said, “This guy doesn’t smile.” He said, “Let’s not give it away, let’s take the audience somewhere else before we shock them,” and he was absolutely right.
DAVID NUTTER: I wanted the tightest bond moment with our heroes before it began and to give the audience a sense of ease, that this is a happy ending, and give them some hope that everything is going to turn out well. I didn’t want to make the audience feel like something bad was going to happen until the big switch.
Then one of Walder Frey’s sons slowly closed the banquet hall’s large wooden door. Suddenly, you got the feeling that something was not quite right.
DAVID NUTTER: It was all about touching it softly, not quite hard, so it could build up even more.
The band began to play the haunting chords of the Lannister anthem “The Rains of Castamere.” The song, which was first introduced early in season two, recounts how Tywin Lannister led his army to murder every member of the rebellious House Reyne. The show had previously referenced the song five times—either played or sung on-screen, or discussed in the dialogue. So when Catelyn recognized the disturbing wrongness of the Freys’ wedding band playing “The Rains of Castamere,” so did the viewer.
Catelyn then looked to Bolton, who had a smug expression that read like, “Yeah, that’s right . . .” She followed Bolton’s eye line to his sleeve, tugged it up, and saw he was wearing protective chain mail hidden under his clothes.
CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN (producer): I noticed there was something animalistic about the way Michael looked at Catelyn during rehearsal. It reminded me of what Robert Shaw talks about in Jaws about how the shark’s eyes roll up before it bites you. So I pointed that out to David Nutter, and he talked to Michael about doing it during the shot.
MICHAEL MCELHATTON: David had to drag that look out of me. Because it’s quite theatrical, that half-smile glare down at her. David was like, “I don’t want subtlety, I want melodrama.”
DAVID BENIOFF: The sequence is all about Catelyn from the moment she pulls up Roose Bolton’s sleeve to the moment she dies.
While Catelyn and Roose were exchanging glances, Walder Frey was giving a speech, announcing that he had a “wedding gift” for Talisa. What came next happened very quickly: Lothar Frey (Tom Brooke) marched up behind Talisa and repeatedly stabbed her.
OONA CHAPLIN: Beat-beat-beat-beat—which surprised me. It surprised me every time, with the gallons of blood coming out of my belly. It’s quite a violent thing when somebody creeps up behind you and starts stabbing you. It was horrendous, very little acting required.
Robb looked profoundly stunned, unable to comprehend what just happened. Crossbows fired from the gallery and the Young Wolf was mortally wounded. He crawled to Talisa and saw her life fade away.
OONA CHAPLIN: It was so sad. I was heartbroken. I looked around at Richard and Michelle and the drummer for Coldplay and thought, “This is it, this is our last scene.” My intention was to commit to the love of Richard—of Robb Stark, but really Richard, let’s be honest.
DAVID NUTTER: The moment when Robb crawls over to Talisa, I remember talking to Richard about love and about relationships and honesty and how much she means to him, and he was really getting into it. He’s such a tremendous actor and was hitting a home run. I remember hearing people crying, and it was the hair and makeup people. I’m a big believer that if a scene is not emotionally driving you as you’re making it, how can you expect the audience to feel the same? I thought, “If we can make ourselves feel something, then this will translate.”
DAVID BENIOFF: I turned to the script supervisor after one take where Richard was dying and I was like, “That was a good take.” And she was just bawling. It’s a bittersweet thing. You’re making all these people sad. But on the other hand, that’s the idea.
OONA CHAPLIN: I was actually crying while I was dead. The director had to come over: “Oona, you need to stop crying, dead people don’t cry. You’re dead, just be dead.”
CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN: It’s not a subtle scene. It’s all anger and anguish. There is no way anybody could overact in that scene.
RICHARD MADDEN: Arya being so close to getting to Robb cut me up even more. With every episode Robb’s been further and further from people he loves. For Arya to be so close, I think that’s what really hurt, because that’s what we’ve all wanted—to get the family back together—even if it was only one of us coming back. That’s what made me really emotional about it.
DAVID BRADLEY: The fact that Walder stage-managed the whole thing, with the band and speech and the crossbows—he’s a consummate actor, making sure nobody could guess what he was up to. To him, this was everything he’d meticulously planned coming to fruition. I had to make sure he was relishing it and enjoyed it.
DAVID BENIOFF: We’re used to, in books and movies when a major character dies, we’re used to a bittersweet final moment. The death speech. You don’t get that here. There’s no redemptive moment. There’s just horror and slaughter. You want revenge so quickly, and you’re deprived of that satisfaction.
Catelyn desperately tried to salvage something from the massacre. She begged for Robb’s life, grabbed one of Frey’s young wives, and held a knife to her throat.
MICHELLE FAIRLEY: At that point you’ve been living [a character] for three years. You know what drives this person; you have to watch her whole insides ripped to shreds watching her son be murdered. The woman was just grief stricken. But she didn’t lose control. She knew she’s dead, and in her mind she wanted to be dead and wanted to get revenge as well. Because of the way it’s filmed you felt incredibly static, which is just powerful—the fact she stays rooted to her spot. Her grief had to be expressed in some shape and form, and that was vocally and through her face. It’s brave and it’s gutsy and “I don’t give a flying fuck what happens to me.”
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Catelyn has the moment there, to plead. There’s also her murdering the hostage. [She’s not a wife] Frey particularly values. So in the end her bluff is empty.
Bolton said, “The Lannisters send their regards,” and plunged a
knife into Robb’s heart.
DAN WEISS: George gave [readers] a triumphant fuck-you death—but it’s Robb Stark’s death! Roose is the one that has the great one-liner before he puts the knife in his heart. It’s got all the elements of a triumphant death, but it’s completely flipped and it’s the wrong side and happening to somebody you love.
Catelyn could have released Frey’s wife, but she carried through on her threat, killing her.
MICHELLE FAIRLEY: I’d lost all my children and my husband. So what else did I have to live for? She came from a very honorable family. Her whole life has been about honor and doing the right thing. In some way she’d been held back by her sense of honor and duty. She constantly questioned her motives and actions. This was one where she didn’t. “I’m not questioning this, I’m just doing it.” I think that’s incredibly liberating. Then she was standing there after like there was nothing left for her. She was dead already. She wanted it. She couldn’t go on.
DAVID NUTTER: We organized it so Catelyn losing it at the end was the last scene we’d shoot. And we talked about how long she would stand there before the guy comes up and puts a knife in her throat. I told David Benioff, “I’ll start it off so she kills Frey’s wife and then she’s in her moment of pure despair and starts to lose herself. I’ll just hang there and wait until you nod your head and then I’ll cue the guy to come in and cut her throat.”
So I called “action.” She took the one girl out and she’s crying and crying. I look over at David Benioff. And she’s still crying and losing it. Suddenly David nodded and the actor came in and cut her throat. The knife cut wasn’t exactly the right positioning, it wasn’t the right inch, but it looked so good.
RICHARD MADDEN: We were mentally exhausted. I cried my eyes out, completely, as did a lot of the crew and other actors. It was very emotional. The wrap party was that night, but I had to start filming another job the next day. So I washed my blood off and got on a plane.
DAN WEISS: We tried to call Michelle afterward. She wasn’t answering. A week later she wrote an email saying, “Sorry, I haven’t been able to talk to anybody about the show for the past week because I’ve been so shattered.”
MICHELLE FAIRLEY: Dan had left me a voicemail, and I did try to ring him back. But by the end of the day I was a walking shell.
ALEX GRAVES: The way it worked out was that everybody walked out the door right afterward, and it was traumatizing. After that we made sure, like for Joffrey’s death, that the actor would have more work after their death scene.
DAVID BENIOFF: It’s weird to say, “Oh, it went great.” Because we’re not just killing characters, we’re losing these actors who have been with us since the beginning. It’s hard, because you love the actors.
DAVID NUTTER: I tend to beat myself up when making something, and I remember getting in my car to go back to my apartment and I said to myself, “That wasn’t so bad.” I felt good about it. No one knew the response would be so immense, but for a television director it was a wonderful feeling knowing how much I affected people in the process of telling a story. It was the best gift I could have ever had.
RICHARD MADDEN: David Nutter made it an operatic, epic sequence that just blew you away. The shocks you got in the book and subtleties from the book—those little details suddenly all pieced together in one big slamming action.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: They pulled it off correctly. They picked perhaps the most brutal scene I ever wrote and made it more brutal. They dialed it up to eleven.
DAN WEISS: It’s not that nobody ever triumphs over adversity. Like Daenerys [unleashing her dragon] in the Plaza of Punishment is such a rousing “Fuck yeah!” moment. It’s mixing up those moments with somebody making a horrible mistake and paying the worst possible price. If everything was gruesome and terrible all the time, you’d always know what was going to happen since it would always be the most gruesome and terrible thing. The range of different possibilities that play out makes it more real because that’s what the world is like. Sometimes wonderful things happen, and sometimes horrible things happen.
MICHAEL LOMBARDO (former HBO programming president): What could have been just a bloodbath was an incredibly moving story about betrayal and a reminder to all of us enjoying the dragons and the ride that no one was safe and the traditional tropes of television were going to be violated.
OONA CHAPLIN: When I was there, I wasn’t seeing everything. They killed his wolf! And Arya was there! All of this stuff was happening around it. And Michelle’s scream. Then there’s that silence. There is no music in the credits. It just sits in your belly. My heart was broken.
Madden pointed out that Talisa dying along with her husband wasn’t just additional shock value but that her demise had a specific story-driven reason. “Because it’s just a full stop to that train of the story of [Robb’s] army,” the actor told Access Hollywood. “I think it’s more tragic that there’s nothing left over from it, that there’s no possibility that Talisa’s in hiding and gonna have a baby and one day, that baby will take over as King in the North.”
A subsequent scene revealed that Tywin Lannister orchestrated the killings, pulling Walder Frey’s strings from the Red Keep. Tywin justified the murders by noting that the Red Wedding ended a civil war that would have cost many more lives had it continued.
DAVID BRADLEY: I didn’t see Walder as an out-and-out villain. I saw him as a warlord, a powerful man who fought his way to the top. I imagined him as a bit of a street fighter when he was younger, and he took any rejection or betrayal personally. In his mind’s eye, he had to avenge that snub. As far as he was concerned, in the wider world in which he lived—which is a very ruthless world—if he hadn’t done anything about it, he would have been toast. It would have been seen as a weakness and exploited by his enemies.
DAN WEISS: One of the things that make these deaths so powerful is they’re the machinations of other characters we know. In this case it’s Tywin, a character we like in spite of ourselves. A monster doesn’t come out of the woodwork and chop these people up. The monsters are our other characters, who aren’t monsters but people with their own motivations and goals.
DAVID BENIOFF: Tywin wasn’t torturing prostitutes for pleasure. He wasn’t a sadist. He was ruthless, for sure, but there’s an argument to be made that Westeros needs ruthlessness. I don’t think of him as evil.
DAN WEISS: I would call him “lawful neutral.”
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: It was the hardest scene I’ve ever had to write. It’s two-thirds of the way through the book, but I skipped over it when I came to it. So the entire book was done and there was still that one chapter left. Then I wrote it. It was like murdering two of your children.
When the book came out I got a lot of emails—and I still get them—saying, “I hate you, how could you do that, I’m never going to read your work again.” Others say, “I threw the book across the room and a week later I picked it up again and it was the greatest thing I ever read.” What can you say to someone who says they’ll never read your book again? People read books for different reasons. I respect that. Some read for comfort. Some of my former readers have said their life is hard, their mother is sick, their dog died, and they read fiction to escape. They don’t want to get hit in the mouth with something horrible. And you read that certain kind of fiction where the guy will always get the girl and the good guys win and it reaffirms to you that life is fair. We all want that at times. But that’s not the kind of fiction I write, in most cases. It’s certainly not what Ice and Fire is. It tries to be more realistic about what life is. It has joy, but it also has pain and fear. I think the best fiction captures life in all its light and darkness.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mummer’s Farce
During the early seasons of Game of Thrones, the showrunners were known for pulling pranks on their cast. Sometimes an actor would play one of their own. Such behind-the-scenes hijinks are typically a sign of a close-knit group. That said, a comprehensive l
ist of all Thrones set pranks will likely never be made public. “My ‘funny prank stories’ are not appropriate, and are maybe illegal,” Jason Momoa said. “They will die with me and with the people I did them on.”
DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): Here’s a minor prank we pulled during season one: We told Maisie and Sophie that since they were underage, they couldn’t come to the pilot wrap party. So we told them they were going to have a special underage wrap party at McDonald’s. They started crying.
DAN WEISS (showrunner): Then they came to the real wrap party and cried through that because they thought they might never see each other again.
The showrunners sent Kit Harington a fake script during season one for the scene where Jon Snow saves Commander Mormont from an undead wight. Only in this version, Snow threw burning drapes onto the creature and the flames engulfed them both.
“When the fire is finally out, we see by torchlight that all of Jon’s hair has burnt down to the scalp,” read the bogus script, according to the book Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones: Seasons 1 & 2. “The skin on the top half of his face has been melted in the extreme heat, blistered and pustulant. Despite what must be the extreme agony of permanent disfigurement, Jon stands stoically by his master’s side. Jon smiles, his teeth shining brightly in his destroyed face. Mormont, sickened, has to look away.”
The twist had Harington believing he would play a gruesomely disfigured character for the rest of his time on the show and would have to spend hours getting prosthetic makeup applied each morning.
DAN WEISS: We told Kit that HBO was worried the Jon Snow storyline was “too Harry Potter,” and they wanted to do something to make it darker. And they thought he was such a strong actor that he could handle it. We kept this up until we started laughing. He was a remarkably good sport about the whole thing.
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