MICHAEL LOMBARDO: It was Armageddon. There was a moment where every company felt exposed in a way they’ve never contemplated before. We were still thinking that somehow what you submitted digitally to one person was private and that this was this secure system. People were looking at their emails and paranoia seeped in. It was a wake-up call that there were bad people out there. You somehow thought that because you were in the entertainment world, you were safe. You realize modern culture has become international and you’re exposed on a much bigger scale.
On the show’s sets in in Northern Ireland and Spain, paparazzi were going to increasingly extreme lengths to penetrate Thrones’ on-the-ground security. The production had to continually ramp up its countermeasures to keep pace. The Northern Ireland sets were designated by the government as no-fly zones. Perimeters were expanded and heavily patrolled. A sensitive set in Spain was literally guarded by the country’s military, which established a roadblock miles away.
DAN WEISS: There was a guy who hiked eighteen hours on foot in the middle of the La Mancha desert to take pictures, and another guy in Northern Ireland who crawled through the mud and did his own little private commando mission.
BERNADETTE CAULFIELD (executive producer): There were times when even I couldn’t get on the set because I didn’t have my badge, because I had told them, “Whoever comes through here, they have to have a badge.” Then I’d have to do the sad walk across the street to go get it.
Even within a guarded perimeter, measures had to be taken to prevent somebody from seeing something they shouldn’t. Printed scripts were largely banished from use in the latter seasons. Every character was given a code name on any production documents. Cast trailers had numbers on their doors rather than character names, so an interloper couldn’t tell which actors were in a scene together.
SOPHIE TURNER: We had like this app where everything disappeared after twenty-four hours; it was like Snapchat for scripts. And we all had code names, which is highly confusing when you needed to remember who was who.
Spoiler photos sometimes leaked anyway. The show’s security team would then use forensic analysis to track down precisely where and when the picture was taken. One aerial shot of a King’s Landing set in Northern Ireland leaked online during filming of season eight, and analysts determined it had been taken from a specific window at the Titanic museum blocks away. The crew then took steps to seal off that particular line of sight.
The most devastating photo leak came during the filming of season eight, when an image of Jon Snow killing Daenerys was posted on Reddit by a day-player crew member.
BERNADETTE CAULFIELD: A lot of times, the person will send it to the girlfriend and then the girlfriend sends it to somebody else, and then the “somebody else” realizes how valuable it is and puts it out there. But sometimes people are lying. So sometimes people will get fired whether they’re lying or not. Because if you don’t reprimand somebody properly, others will think, “Oh, it’s not really a problem, then.” If anything, the crew would get more upset if we didn’t do it—“Why did this person not get fired when we’re all following the rules?” Because everyone else works so hard to keep information from getting out. So we were put in the position where we had to let people go unless what they did was really benign.
After the finale photo leaked, the producers put out misleading images to try to generate confusion online. Cast members were even flown to sets where their characters weren’t actually filming to throw off any spies. The only thing the production did not do was shoot alternate endings to the show, despite reports claiming otherwise.
DAN WEISS: We didn’t shoot other endings because that would have been an insane waste of time and money. But we had a lot of fake images and shots. We staged Jon Snow bowing down to Cersei on a set we knew people would be taking pictures of.
DAVID BENIOFF: We had a zombie giant walking through King’s Landing; we had the Night King at King’s Landing.
DAN WEISS: It was all about putting enough fake things out there that looked real. Sadly, at a time when truth is disappearing from the world, the best way to fight truth was putting out lots of plausible falsehoods. Just drown the truth in bullshit.
Ultimately, the spoiler leaks and fandom obsession were luxury problems. It meant Thrones was drawing the interest of perhaps hundreds of millions of fans. The show’s cast was boosted to stardom, and crew members gained an invaluable credit on their résumés. The success of Thrones was also a financial windfall for thousands of people who profited either directly from the production or, far more often, indirectly—from restaurateur in Belfast to tour operators in Croatia to hotel owners in Spain to entrepreneurs who launched tie-in products.
And yet . . .
BRYAN COGMAN: It’s hard to remember, but for a long time we were the underdog. We didn’t win the [best drama] Emmy until season five. We were this strange little upstart that people kept talking about. Being the biggest show, for me, was a double-edged sword. To see the Bud Light ad in the Super Bowl and the White Walker Oreos . . . that’s all fine. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have enjoyed it. But at the same time, there was a feeling of . . . I remember when we were a company that was just trying to put on a show.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Forks in the Road
George R. R. Martin sat at a tucked-away table at his favorite restaurant in Santa Fe, a modest family-owned spot where green chili enchiladas and taco plates are ordered by their number. Even though he was out of sight from the main dining room, Thrones fans still managed to find him and ask for a photo. With his fluffy snow-white beard, suspenders, and ever-present fisherman’s cap, Martin looks a bit like a literary character himself, as the author admits.
“When we did the first season, Sean Bean was the only well-known actor in the cast, but I was a bestselling author,” Martin said. “So HBO used me in a lot of their early publicity, and my picture got out there and I became well-known. I guess my appearance is rather distinctive. Then I discovered you can’t turn that off. Like, I can’t go into a bookstore anymore, which is one of my favorite pleasures in life. I used to spend a whole day browsing around and leave with many books under my arm. Now I’m there five minutes and somebody asks for an autograph or a photo and pretty soon I have a circle of people around me. You gain a lot and lose things too.”
Martin pointed across the dining room to an even more secluded nook. Right over there, he said, was where he’d sat with David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Bryan Cogman back in 2013 and revealed his long-held secret ending for A Song of Ice and Fire. By that time it was clear to Martin that the show would have major divergences from his novels.
“During the pilot reshoot, I visited the set on the isle of Malta and met some of the new actors,” Martin recalled. “There was some crisis that occurred. The director called David and Dan over, and they were having some discussion about ten feet away about how to handle it. And that was when I realized my baby wasn’t entirely my baby anymore, because I wasn’t part of that discussion. The director was talking to Dan and Dave. Nobody was saying, ‘George, come over and tell us your opinion.’
“I didn’t throw a tantrum or anything,” Martin added calmly. “I just came to the realization: I gave my baby up for adoption and now there is a parent-teacher conference and I’m not invited.”
Another early sign of the show’s autonomy was when the producers decided to have King Joffrey order Ser Ilyn Payne to cut out the singer Marillion’s tongue in season one (in the books, the victim is a different minstrel). “George was none too pleased because in the books Marillion ends up being the patsy for Lysa Arryn’s murder, which happened in season four,” Bryan Cogman said. “David and Dan’s reasoning was it’s better television to have this minstrel whose tongue is ripped out be the minstrel that we’d spend the season with and that we’d figure out Lysa’s murder when we got to it, and we did.”
Martin’s fifth A Song of Ice and Fire novel, the 1,040-
page A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011, the same year Thrones debuted. Martin still had two more books planned, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. Given that Dragons took six years to write, fans worried from the start that the HBO series was going to outpace the books. “Finish the book, George!” became an Internet rallying cry. A few years into the series, executives at the network grew nervous as well. “I finally understood fans’ fear, which I didn’t a couple of years before,” Michael Lombardo said during production of season three. “What if the storytelling catches up to the books? Let’s all hope and pray that’s not going to be a problem.”
Fandom and network angst paled in comparison to Martin’s own concern. The author posted dismayed updates on his blog detailing his struggle to complete Winds. He attributed the setbacks to a mix of factors—the complexity of the story, his perfectionism, and the distractions and opportunities that came along with being part of the HBO series. “On Tuesday, I think it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done,” Martin said. “On Wednesday, I think it’s all garbage and I should throw it all in the fire and start again.”
DAN WEISS (showrunner): We just did the math on how many seasons we got, how many the story could shoulder and service, and we realized we were going to outstrip the books. So we sat down with him in Santa Fe for three days and dug as deep as we could into what he had in mind for the future of the series through the end.
BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): I can’t even describe that meeting. It was like learning the meaning of life. Like God was coming down and telling you the future. We knew at that point that we were going to catch up. So it was learning a lot of these secrets and then in your mind figuring out, “What of that will work in the context of our show?”
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): It wasn’t easy for me. I didn’t want to give away my books. It’s not easy to talk about the end of my books. Every character has a different end. I told them who would be on the Iron Throne, and I told them some big twists like Hodor and “hold the door,” and Stannis’s decision to burn his daughter. We didn’t get to everybody by any means. Especially the minor characters, who may have very different endings.
DAN WEISS: What makes the books so great is that George doesn’t make meticulous blueprints for every beat of this story, then fill in the blanks by dutifully going from A to B to C, fleshing out an outline. George didn’t have ultra-detailed versions of the last hundred pages of his story figured out.
DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): George often used the metaphor of being a gardener instead of an architect. He plants the seeds and watches them grow. Even if we wanted to be gardeners, we couldn’t. We had to plan out entire seasons. We had to write a detailed outline and provide that to production. Writing a novel is a solo endeavor, and television is a team sport. I’m horribly mixing my metaphors, but the basic point is George was a gardener, and we had to be architects to plan out the seasons meticulously so they get shot and were ready in time. It’s just a fundamental difference between writing novels and TV series.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: David warned me: “We’re catching up.” I said: “I know you are.” But at that time I still thought they wouldn’t catch up. I thought I’d stay ahead.
Martin was confident he could finish his saga before the end of Thrones because he’d made an assumption about how the showrunners would use his already published fourth and fifth A Song of Ice and Fire books. The show’s first two seasons were based on the author’s first two novels, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. Seasons three and four were based on the fan-favorite 992-page A Storm of Swords.
Martin’s next two titles, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, were a combined 1,824 pages. So the author believed that was more than enough to keep the show occupied for several more years. But the new books also added many new characters and storylines, particularly set in Dorne and the Iron Islands. There were so many added threads that the books had an unusual format—covering the same chronological period while focusing on different characters.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: In The Lord of the Rings, everything begins in the Shire with Bilbo’s birthday party, and then the four hobbits set off and they pick up Strider and Gimli and Legolas, and then they start to split up and go their separate ways. That was the same structure I used. It all begins in Winterfell with everybody except Dany. They split up and split further and further. Everything is getting wider, and it’s always been my intent to curve back at the end. It’s the same structure as the show, but David and Dan made the turn much sooner and didn’t introduce some of my new characters, like Arianne Martell and Quentyn Martell.
Martin considered his new characters essential. The showrunners felt their show had to stay focused on its existing cast and maintain the momentum of its established storylines. By season five, Thrones was bursting at the seams with up to thirty series regulars and darting between eight stories set in different locations—Daenerys fighting an uprising in Meereen, Cersei struggling with the Faith Militant in King’s Landing, Sansa dealing with Ramsay at Winterfell, Brienne traveling in the North, Arya training at the House of Black and White, Jon navigating his newfound leadership duties at Castle Black, Stannis and Ser Davos marching their army south, and Jaime trying to rescue Myrcella in Dorne.
That’s a lot of story. So much, in fact, that Thrones was occasionally leaving major characters out of certain episodes, or gave them just a few minutes of screen time, even though series regulars are paid for every episode produced whether they’re used or not. One major arc—Bran’s journey to becoming the Three-Eyed Raven—was sidelined for the entire fifth season. The Hound was likewise benched that year. Asking an actor to take a year off is always risky or expensive, as they need to be kept under contract lest they get snatched up by other projects. Plus, all those storylines meant that Thrones had grown from filming with two units to occasionally using four (dubbed Wolf, Dragon, Raven, and White Walker). Having four units shooting an ambitious fantasy television series at the same time in different locations was a madcap juggling act that was very tough on the crew and made it more difficult for the producers to maintain quality.
In other words, adding even more characters and locations to Thrones, from a practical storytelling and production standpoint, seemed totally impossible . . . though, to be fair, making a “totally impossible” adaptation was always part of the deal. Martin made it clear from the outset that he was was writing a story that was shattering storytelling conventions, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the author would continue to find new ways of doing so.
DAVID BENIOFF: We didn’t want to do a ten-year adaptation of the books. We didn’t want to spend four years with Dany in Meereen. If we were to remain entirely faithful to A Feast for Crows, half the characters—the most popular characters—would be absent from the screen. There would be no Tyrion, no Dany, no Arya, no Jon Snow. It’s always been about adapting the series as a whole and following the map George laid out for us and the major milestones but not necessarily each of the stops along the way. It’s an adaptation. It had to adapt in order to survive.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I thought Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons would be recombined, because you can’t separate them the way I did in the books, and I thought there were three seasons there. At the very least, two seasons. But they got through it all in one season because they eliminated so much. They really started taking shortcuts and cutting things. They eliminated Lady Stoneheart and Quentyn Martell and his voyage across the world and Tyrion’s journey where he goes to Pentos and hooks up with Magister Illyrio, and then he crosses the hills and meets up with Jon Connington and Aegon on the river and they make the long journey down the river to Volantis and they encounter Jorah Mormont, who takes him prisoner—they skipped over that.
DAVID BENIOFF: We don’t get bonus points for being strictly faithful to the books. It doesn’t give us anything extra. For every decision, if there’s a fork in the road and the fork to
the left is strictly adhering to the books and to the right is what’s better for the series, we’re always going to take that path to the right.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: So I thought I had three years to get out the next book, and suddenly I was racing to get it out before season five. I realized season five was supposed to come out in April [of 2015], and my publisher said, “If we get it in by the end of the year, we can rush it out in March.” I said, “Okay, I can still get this one book out before the next season.” When it became clear I wasn’t going to have it done by the end of the year, it really took a lot of wind out of my sails. Suddenly, they were ahead of me. I should have gotten the last two books out sooner.
The producers attempted to represent some of Martin’s new characters. The show introduced the Sand Snakes in Dorne and added Euron Greyjoy in the Iron Islands. But the jettisoned character fans clamored to see the most was one who had only a couple of cryptic appearances in the books—Lady Stoneheart. At the end of A Storm of Swords, Catelyn Stark was resurrected from her Red Wedding fate as a silent undead specter of vengeance. The reveal is one of the most shocking moments in the books. The character also appears in one more subsequent chapter, but her purpose to readers is not yet clear.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Lady Stoneheart has a role in the books. Whether it’s sufficient or interesting enough . . . I think it is or I wouldn’t have put her in. One of the things I wanted to show with her is that the death she suffered changes you.
DAVID BENIOFF: There was never really much debate about [including Lady Stoneheart]. There is that one great scene.
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