Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

by James Hibberd

  It was fascinating to see this little girl giggling in the sunlight. Laughing on command was the most difficult thing, and it was so weird to be able to laugh and joke around on set and not be told off for it.

  Another revealing scene was when Arya stitched up the Hound’s wound, and the exhausted Clegane gave some rare insight into his backstory. Some of the dialogue was originally intended for a season-one scene with Sansa, but producers had to cut the speech and give some of it to Littlefinger due to production trouble. Time made the monologue better. McCann delivered his lines with years of lived-in weariness, and instead of talking to a stranger, he was opening up to a young woman that he perhaps loved in his own way.

  BRYAN COGMAN: The Hound snuck up on you as a major character. And even though you’ve heard other people talking about his origin story, just to hear him talk about it and give voice to it four seasons in, there was a vulnerability there that he allowed himself to do that for Arya. The whole monologue ends with the line, “You think you’re on your own . . . ,” and that’s the most vulnerable we’ve ever seen him. Out of context, the line doesn’t seem like much. But it was one of those simple, beautiful bits of dialogue that I don’t think David and Dan got enough credit for as writers. A lot of the imitators of Game of Thrones try to do fantasy speak. In David and Dan’s best episodes, there was a beautiful simplicity to their dialogue.

  Arya’s season-four road trip concluded when Brienne caught up to her and fought with the Hound. Brienne and the Hound both believed they were protecting Arya from the other. The vicious duel was shot in Iceland and pushed Gwendoline Christie and Rory McCann to their absolute limit.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE (Brienne of Tarth): I trained for six weeks. It was one of the fucking hardest things I’ve ever done in my life—fighting up hills, down hills, rolls, fighting on rock face with a sheer down drop. My hands were like tramp’s feet, swollen. Rory McCann is an amazing actor and a very strong man, and that was a challenge—not just as actors, but as characters.

  ALEX GRAVES (director): The idea was it would devolve into a street fight and be the ugliest fight we’d ever had on the show. I’d watch rehearsals and say, “What if he kicks her in the groin? What if she bites his ear off? And not just bite it off, but lock eyes with him and spit it out so he’d see it?” Gwen burst out laughing and couldn’t wait to do it.

  DAN WEISS: They’re two people who by the time we got them together, you’re rooting for both of them. Brienne, obviously, is a more moral character than the Hound, but I would hope you couldn’t help but love the Hound in spite of yourself. Here you got Achilles fighting Hector—there wasn’t a good guy or a bad guy; it’s two people you’re both extremely invested in, and there’s fascination and horror knowing one of them is inevitably going to get the worst of this situation.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: I like it to be real. Rory and I might not be killing each other, but we were both making contact with those swords. We were quite serious about it. We are two people that really go for it in that situation. We wanted contact—rolling around in the dirt on a rock face with your hand bleeding. You’re in pain and blood is pouring out of your mouth and you’re falling over when you’re meant to and falling when you’re not meant to. You’re on top of a mountain with this surreal landscape and your adrenaline is pumping and you’ve got what looks like blood everywhere and you’re in pain and you’re hitting the living daylights out of each other.

  ALEX GRAVES: The way she ends up winning is by losing her mind and going totally psychotic.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: You’re genuinely scared, because you look into [McCann’s] eyes and they mean it. It was frightening—that was one of the few times I’ve not had to do any acting. I was screaming, “Fuck you! Come on!” Blood everywhere, going insane. It was fucking mental. I lost it at points and would just go in screaming.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Purple Wedding

  There was something guiltily satisfying about watching the sadistic Joffrey Baratheon die over and over again.

  It was September 2013, and the day was gorgeous, particularly by Game of Thrones filming standards. The production was set up on a shady hillside grove in Dubrovnik overlooking the deep-blue Adriatic Sea. Lannister flags fluttered in a light breeze. Long banquet tables were set with golden plates gleaming in the warm sun.

  As the set was being readied for filming, cast members prepared in their own unique ways. Charles Dance slowly paced, the fearsome Lannister lord having a smoke. Sophie Turner grooved happily to some music. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau practiced his swordplay with an unsteady left hand. Natalie Dormer strolled through the grove looking focused, her lips moving, apparently running her lines. Newcomer to the series Pedro Pascal excitedly socialized, looking like a fan who couldn’t believe his luck. Costumed extras playing the wedding guests were getting lunch at craft services (King’s Landing elites mostly consist of wealthy older men partnered with young women—one of those subtleties you notice on set but seldom pick up when watching the show). And Thrones’ legendary swordmaster, C. C. Smiff, whose credits include Star Wars films and Gladiator, decided to give a reporter a lesson in the basics of fighting with a broadsword. (When people ask my favorite moment from visiting the Thrones set over the years, this was it.)

  Over in the video village tent (where producers watch monitors showing the camera feeds under a black canopy), executive producers David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Carolyn Strauss looked gravely serious. They were taking advantage of the downtime by engaging in an epic Candy Crush battle on their phones. Meanwhile, Icelandic band Sigur Rós readied nearby to perform for King Joffrey, and admitted they were somewhat anxious about their cameo. “If they look nervous in front of a total sociopath, it’s not the worst thing in the world,” noted Weiss, wearing a “Don’t Hassle the Joff” T-shirt.

  For once, a show that was notoriously difficult to create was all running smoothly and easily, despite having to stage an incredibly complicated sequence.

  Everybody was ready to kill the king.

  * * *

  —

  For the first three seasons of Game of Thrones, Joffrey loomed large as the show’s love-to-hate villain. The teen titan was an infuriating combination of spoiled petulance, cruel bullying, intellectual ineptitude, and utter cowardice. In a show packed with shades-of-gray characters, Joffrey was impressively devoid of any redeeming qualities (other than, perhaps, given his youth and upbringing, that he’s arguably less responsible for his actions than an adult character would be).

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): Joffrey is a classic thirteen-year-old bully. Do you know many thirteen-year-old kids you’d like to give absolute power to? There’s a cruelty in children, especially children of a certain age, that you see in junior high and middle school.

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): Far more often than the evil alpha male, out to do evil for the sake of evil, bad things often come from people unfit to occupy positions of power. They don’t have the moral fiber or leadership skills, but for some reason they find themselves sitting on the throne, and that’s where things go horribly wrong.

  Cersei Lannister had to watch her child evolve into an uncontrollable monster, and by season four she was suffering under his tyranny just like everybody else.

  LENA HEADEY (Cersei Lannister): Joffrey was literally out of [Cersei’s] control. She kept trying to be the soft, gentle mother with him, and he needed a good slap. It was so painful for her that it’s such a big fuckup that the kid she loved so much was so out of hand and she has little to no control over him. Her honest state was fear, but it was covered by greed and pride. She was terrified of being found out by him.

  I loved it [in season three] when she said, “If it weren’t for my children, I’d have thrown myself from the highest window of the Red Keep.” That also told me that Jaime wasn’t the love of her life and her children were. She felt terribly fucking guilty that they’re from that union, and she even t
alked to Tyrion about that—like, “I fucked my brother, now I have kids, and it’s all going tits-up.” Cersei really wished she were born a man. Her children were her sanity, so the more they crumbled, the more she did.

  DAN WEISS: We were once at Comic-Con, and Samuel L. Jackson explained to us for five minutes why Joffrey absolutely, positively had to die and gave us all his reasons for wanting Joffrey dead.

  In interviews over the years, the producers would take pains to point out that actor Jack Gleeson was vastly unlike Joffrey. The producers were partly concerned Gleeson might get mistreated for his role in real life, but mostly they marveled that such a young performer could so convincingly play such a loathsome psychopath.

  DAN WEISS: Jack’s soft-spoken. He’s funny. He’s decent to people. And yet he has this unfailing sense of what the most horrible person in the world would be like and how he would say a line, because he always gets it right.

  When Gleeson got into character on set, the change was sometimes so abrupt and convincing, it left his costars unnerved.

  ESMÉ BIANCO (Ros): Working with Jack was a total trip because he is like this very mild-mannered, sweet, soft-spoken guy. In between takes, when everyone else is on their phones, he sat there with a textbook studying theology and philosophy or something. Then you get on set with him. He’s the only actor I have ever seen this with: I could actually see the moment, without him saying a word, that he became Joffrey. It was uncanny. Something changed in his eyes, and all of a sudden he went from being Jack to being Joffrey. It was so creepy. I have goose bumps now talking about it.

  SOPHIE TURNER (Sansa Stark): Jack was such an insane actor. When he changed like that, he was a scary kid. But he wasn’t like one of those Method actors that goes into a dark place. If he was one of those guys, he’d be horrible to work with.

  JACK GLEESON (Joffrey Baratheon): Ninety percent of the time I was feeling what Joffrey would feel—glee or desire for attention or frustration or whatever. Then there’s the 10 percent where through lack of focus or whatever you realize you’re shouting at Sigur Rós and there’s one thousand people looking at you and three cameras, and sometimes it became a bit mechanical. But that’s fun as well, to take yourself out of it and appreciate it. But you wouldn’t be able to work if you did that all the time; you have to focus on what the character thinks.

  One of the most riveting Joffrey scenes was when Margaery Tyrell tried to find a way to connect with her betrothed in season three while he showed off his new crossbow. Margaery was skilled at discovering men’s desires and fulfilling those desires. But she realized the king’s tastes were far darker than she had ever imagined.

  NATALIE DORMER (Margaery Tyrell): The crossbow scene was a high point in my experience because it was the first time Jack and I really got our teeth into, like, the dance of power between us, and I was really trying to work out if she was going to be able to control this psychopath.

  DANIEL MINAHAN (director): That scene had all of these great turns as the power shifted back and forth between them. She would try one thing that wouldn’t work. He would see through it. She would try another thing. He would try something, she would counter. It was really complex and beautiful.

  Joffrey eventually used his crossbow to kill Ros, but not before he forced the sex worker to beat another woman with a scepter in one of the show’s blackest moments.

  ESMÉ BIANCO: That was the worst scene I had to shoot; it was horrible. It was massively uncomfortable. And that turned into a big controversy, because people thought I was doing something way worse than beating her with that scepter. I’m like, “How did you ever get there?” That reaction said more about the viewers than the show.

  There were a few moments along the way where Gleeson was permitted to express some compassion. Joffrey was devastated when he saw his father, King Robert, on his deathbed, and there was a scene in season two in which Joffrey sincerely apologized to Sansa and kissed her.

  JACK GLEESON: I was going to play that like I don’t care. But Dan was like, “Try maybe to express a genuine love for Sansa that Joffrey actually has.” That was an attempt to put some gray into the black. But overall, it was a pretty evil road.

  And that road came to an end at a Croatian hillside park during the filming of season four’s “The Lion and the Rose.”

  During rehearsal, Gleeson’s politeness was on display as the cast sat along a banquet table on an elevated stage. All the characters were on one side of the table, with Joffrey in the center, a grouping reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper (and for Joffrey, of course, it was). As Gleeson read through Joffrey’s taunts, Peter Dinklage got a kick out of tormenting the young actor for his character’s behavior. “Uncle, where are you going?” Gleeson read. “You’re my cupbearer, remember?” Then Dinklage joked: “God, you’re such an asshole!” And when a few drops of prop wine fell onto Dinklage’s iPad, Gleeson apologized, “Sorry, it’s just a little dribble.” Dinklage fired back, “What did you call me?!” Watching “Tyrion” make “Joffrey” look cowed and remorseful was amusingly surreal.

  The dinner sequence also included a succession of character pairings amid the formalities of celebrating Joffrey’s wedding to Margaery. For a curiously long time, nothing of importance occurred at the banquet, which paradoxically increased the tension.

  ALEX GRAVES (director): This was a thirty-five-page scene. They’ve won the war against Robb Stark. Tywin is celebrating his victory. Joffrey is turning into a man-king. Cersei’s always got an edge to her, but she’s really having a pretty good day. I had dwarfs and birds and cakes and pies, and nothing going wrong. I saw that as like one of the coolest challenges. There’s a growing sense of dread and absolutely nothing showing it. You just keep presenting everything in such a way that’s saying: “Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s wrong, nothing’s wrong,” which is unnerving.

  DAN WEISS: The trick with any long sequence like that is that at a certain point people start to think, “I’m watching this, it’s been fifteen minutes in one place, something momentous is going to happen.” So one of the major tricks to pull off was to keep people in the moment with all the characters interacting with one another and not let them think about the bigger picture—why we’ve been at this wedding for fifteen minutes.

  One of the party’s diversions was Joffrey using his sword to smash open a giant pie filled with live birds. It was one of those complex and potentially hazardous stunts that nearly every other movie or TV show would have kicked down the line to CGI animators but Thrones producers insisted on doing it using practical effects. The “pie” was filled with twenty-one trained birds from Bosnia, which would be released with a hidden trapdoor. The scene caused a bit of concern, as nobody knew for certain what the birds would actually do when released.

  “Live birds, what could go wrong?” Weiss deadpanned at the time.

  “They could fly back to Bosnia,” Benioff replied.

  “They could attack Jack and peck his face off,” Weiss countered.

  When Joffrey struck the pie, the birds flew out perfectly. Gleeson looked a tad startled, but that was okay. A few prosthetic “dead” birds were added into the contraption to show viewers that some birds didn’t survive. (“In a way, it’s a metaphor for the show,” Weiss noted.)

  Another of the party’s amusements was a play-within-the-play performance by jousting dwarfs that Joffrey orchestrated to humiliate Tyrion. The jaw of a twenty-foot-high lion’s head opened, and five actors rushed out pretending to ride horses. In Martin’s book, the dwarfs rode pigs, an idea the producers briefly considered.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: The producers couldn’t find a pig that anybody could ride. I went on YouTube at one point and I found like seventeen videos of people riding pigs, but they all fall off after two seconds, and none had to hold a lance and go after each other.

  DAN WEISS: It was not feasible, on a production level, to have a person riding a pig. We were told it was not fa
ir to the pig.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: David and Dan came up with a brilliant conceit of bringing in dwarfs all representing the pretenders to the throne and having them fight each other. It accomplished the same purpose without having to deal with a pig.

  For Dinklage, the dwarf joust—using little people for a mocking spectacle—made him “uncomfortable as an actor.” But he added that such feelings were “good” because they helped his performance while he watched from the sidelines, wearing an expression of cold anger.

  PETER DINKLAGE (Tyrion Lannister): I think actors get too comfortable. I like being uncomfortable as an actor because it keeps you alive. It is a true collaboration between Dave and Dan in terms of what works and what doesn’t. If it doesn’t work for me, they have this brilliant matter of convincing me it works, and nine times out of ten they’re right.

  As Joffrey’s bullying humiliations increased, Tyrion walked a careful line: He was polite, yet maintained his dignity, refusing to play the fool. His resistance irritated Joffrey. The king always wanted total subservience, and his uncle wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. The audience had long learned that any character defying Joffrey was playing a deadly game, and they began to suspect something horrible was going to happen to somebody—just not to Joffrey.

  JACK GLEESON: Normal brides and grooms take control and go a bit crazy at their weddings. Joffrey is already controlling and crazy, so this was just fanning the flames of his petulance.