Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

by James Hibberd

  Melisandre was wrong about Stannis being “the prince that was promised,” and very wrong about sacrificing Shireen. But in season two, the Red Woman burned three leeches, plump with Gendry’s royal blood, and told Stannis her spell would bring about the deaths of three usurpers to his claim to the Iron Throne. It was a bold storytelling move to correctly tell viewers that two major characters, Robb Stark and Joffrey Baratheon (along with Balon Greyjoy), were going to be killed in advance. Yet fans were still shocked by those twists because the show had made clear that magic was unreliable. Even now, it remains uncertain if Melisandre’s sorcery had anything to do with their fates.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: You’re supposed to debate that. Melisandre wanted everyone to think that the spell she did with the leeches killed the three kings, but there is another explanation: Her ability to see the future through the flames showed her that the kings were going to die because of the machinations of other characters. Seeing their deaths were coming, she just staged this demonstration to take credit for their deaths.

  Martin pointed out that even his use of prophecies had a medieval-history precedent.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: It happened in the War of the Roses. One of the lords [Somerset] was prophesied that he would die at [Windsor Castle]. So he always made pains to avoid that castle. But then in the First Battle of St. Albans, he was wounded and died outside a pub that had that castle on its pub sign. You have to look at prophecies carefully and look at the weasel wording.

  Later in season five, Jon Snow witnessed some genuine dark magic. The newly elevated lord commander took a band of Night’s Watch brothers to rescue a group of Wildlings at a fishing village called Hardhome. The group was overrun by the Night King and his army of undead wights, and the living had to frantically scramble to escape.

  To direct the episode, producers initially reached out to Neil Marshall, who had helmed the battles at Blackwater and Castle Black, but he wasn’t available. (“My biggest regret,” Marshall said, “is that I turned down ‘Hardhome.’”) So the production took a chance on a newcomer to the show, a director who would evolve Thrones’ style and raise the bar for action sequences in television and, perhaps, cinema as well.

  DAVE HILL: It was trial by fire for Miguel Sapochnik. It was: “Here’s our biggest action sequence for season five. We all love it. You don’t know all the actors or the crew. Make your magic happen.” But Miguel is a super prepper. He came in with a plan of attack. It was all hands on deck for that month, and it came out even better than what we had on the page.

  MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK (director): In the first draft of “Hardhome,” the battle took place on a huge beach with the wights descending from the top of the beach down to the shoreline over the course of the entire fight. But because it’s an ambush, the Wildlings are unprepared. We figured that it would only take the wights about forty seconds, running at full pelt, to cover that distance. Adding to the challenge was the simple fact that it was wights versus ninety-five thousand Wildlings, which made seeing much of this on-screen too expensive.

  So we started looking for some obstacle to slow down the wights. My first idea was to stem their flow by forcing them through a naturally occurring bottleneck between two cliffs. Eventually we came up with a staked fence that surrounded part of the encampment. It was also a way to avoid seeing beyond a certain point and hiding what we couldn’t afford to dress or populate.

  [What viewers saw] was essentially a microcosm of the action that we could control and point the camera in almost any direction. We were able to reduce the overall scale of the battle, focus on the massacre aspect, and see a lot less but feel a lot more. The most successful and frightening monster is the one you cannot see.

  The production built a stockade wall that was eighteen feet high and three hundred feet long to delay the Army of the Dead. For the wights, prosthetics supervisor Barrie Gower explained to Making Game of Thrones that costumed background actors were costumed three different ways: “Super fresh” (those who looked recently killed and wore a minor amount of makeup and prosthetics), “mid-decomps” (those who appeared as if they’d been dead for about six months), and “green screen” (actors who wore green bodysuits with a minimal amount of ragged clothing and were made to look skeletal with CGI during post-production). Sapochnik pitted the groups of wights against the Wildlings during frantic shots, declaring on set, “When I call action, I want you to take them down.”

  But as usual for shooting Thrones battles, the weather gods decided the filming of “Hardhome” would be a perfect time to deliver a massive storm that made everything harder.

  DAVE HILL: The rain was coming in sideways. It was coming right through the tents. But the rain doesn’t really read on the screen. When you see all them running you don’t realize it’s pouring. They all ran up and down the quarry, over slippery rocks and mud. They had to run up and down over and over and over again.

  KIT HARINGTON (Jon Snow): It was chaos. Joyous chaos. The weather helped [the performances]. A lot of people remember Battle of the Bastards, but for me Hardhome was the battle I loved the most. I loved shooting it. Story-wise, it was fantastic.

  MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: What impressed me most about Kit is that he thinks his way through the action scenes in the same way he thinks his way through a dialogue scene. He finds time to play the beats in between the action. That episode was endless for him, but he never complained and was always willing to go the extra mile, do the extra take, and put his all into it. I don’t know any other actor who works that hard, and it shows in the finished product.

  CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN (producer): Kit is slight of build but enormously strong. You had to be careful with him because he never says “stop,” so you could wear him out. You don’t want to drive your leading man into the ground. And we were still worried about the state of his ankle because he wouldn’t say anything if it was bothering him. Kit is like Jon Snow in real life. He’s the actor who never gives up. And that’s a good role model to have for all the other actors and the crew.

  DAVE HILL: We had some extras who were Dublin based. They would get picked up at one A.M. and get bused all the way to the north coast to get dressed as Wildlings. They would then lie down on these rocks, with the water washing over them from the rain, and stay there—for hours. They’d get home at ten P.M. and then get up again at one A.M. to do it all over again. God bless the Irish.

  During the fighting, Jon Snow discovered, to his amazement, that his Valyrian-steel sword could kill White Walkers, a fact that would be key later on. But the big villain of the piece was the Night King. The supernatural leader of the White Walkers and the Army of the Dead was first introduced in season four. During a flashback we’d learned the Children of the Forest had created the Night King thousands of years ago to fight their enemies, the invading First Men, and now, with winter finally arriving, he was leading his legions south to invade Westeros. The Night King was a character-design home run—a striking, stoic, blue-eyed specter of wintry death that quickly became the show’s most popular original addition to Martin’s mythology.

  DAN WEISS: It was almost logical as you went back in time, as you create the prehistory for all this. We’ve seen what the White Walkers do, we’ve seen how they perpetuate themselves and created the wights. If you’re going backward, well, they made these things . . . so what made them?

  We also liked the implication that they weren’t some kind of cosmic evil that had been around since the beginning of time, but that the White Walkers had a history—that something that seems legendary and mythological and permanent wasn’t. They had a historical cause that was comprehensible, just like the way the wars we’re seeing are comprehensible. They’re the result of people, or beings, with motivations we can understand.

  DAVID BENIOFF: I don’t think of him as evil; I think of him as Death. And that’s what he wants—for all of us. It’s why he was created, and that’s what he’s after.

  The Night King was played by actor
Richard Brake in seasons four and five, and then Slovak actor and stuntman Vladímir Furdík took over for seasons six through eight. Furdík also played the White Walker that Jon Snow killed in “Hardhome.”

  VLADÍMIR FURDÍK (the Night King, seasons 6–8): Somebody made him the Night King. Nobody knows who he was before—a soldier or part of [nobility]. He never wanted to be the Night King. I think he wants revenge.

  The producers decided to keep the character utterly silent, continuing what they had learned after initially wanting the White Walkers to speak during the scrapped pilot.

  DAVID BENIOFF: What’s he going to say? Anything the Night King says diminishes him.

  VLADÍMIR FURDÍK: Every director had a different vision of how to play him. Dan and David wanted him to be like a cold man. Some of the directors wanted to show that there’s some human in him. Many times they asked me, “Don’t blink your eyes.” This was very difficult.

  The final shot of “Hardhome” was one of the show’s most iconic: The Night King stands on the beach. Jon Snow and the surviving Wildlings were slowly escaping in rowboats. The Night King locked eyes with Jon, raised his arms, and all the slaughtered Wildlings were resurrected to join his Army of the Dead. At that moment, Jon Snow fully understood the Night King’s seemingly insurmountable power—and that Westeros was facing a threat that could annihilate them all.

  MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: The silent ending in that moment came from a happy mistake. Someone forgot to extend the music track over that part of the rough cut, and I found it much more powerful without music. All these things are a process. As much as it would be nice to start at the end, it’s the process that brings out the best in an idea.

  DAVE HILL: It was funny to see that become a meme. In the script we thought of it as the Night King being the conductor of a symphony, raising his hands and raising the dead. But on-screen it came off like, “Come at me, bro.”

  MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: Seeing an emoji of the Night King raising his arms was probably the most famous I’ve ever felt about my work.

  KIT HARINGTON: I remember looking back at that beach with the Night King standing there and all the wights are standing up. The camera was behind us on a wide shot, so I was looking at it as [the viewer] would see it—from the front of the boat back at the beach. I’m one of the few people who got to experience that. And it was glorious.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Shame . . . Shame . . . Shame . . .”

  Lena Headey looked so ghastly that you wanted to call for help.

  Her hair was shorn ragged, her eyes red rimmed, her pale skin was scabbed and smeared with what looked like blood and pieces of . . . well, hopefully that was only mud?

  Yet Headey was happily munching on pizza as Peter Dinklage and Conleth Hill led a chorus of cast and crew singing “Happy Birthday” to the actress.

  It was October 2014 in Dubrovnik, and Headey was enjoying a birthday party unlike any other: a cheerful celebration in a production tent between filming scenes in Old Town, followed by taking a long trudge through ancient streets while five hundred bystanders screamed vile obscenities at her.

  “Aside from being covered in shit, a girl doesn’t want for more,” Headey quipped.

  The “Walk of Shame” was a gripping sequence adapted from Martin’s A Dance with Dragons. Modern use of the term stems from college campus slang for a person walking home the morning after sex while still wearing clothes from the previous night out. But Martin’s usage was based off the punishment of King Edward IV’s mistress Jane Shore in the fifteenth century. After Edward’s death in 1483, the king’s brother took the throne and charged Shore with conspiracy, accusing her of “sorcery” and “witchcraft.” Shore was forced to endure a penance walk through London wearing only a thin white undergarment while the crowd “shamed” her.

  LENA HEADEY (Cersei Lannister): George told me they used to do it to women in the Middle Ages. Well, they do it now. They take women out and stone them to death. Fucking terrifying. I can’t even imagine people wanting your blood. Cersei has done wrong, but I don’t think anyone deserved that treatment.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): It was a punishment directed at women to break their pride, and Cersei is defined by her pride.

  Shooting the season-five sequence was a major challenge to pull off in the middle of a popular tourist destination. During the planning phase, a Dubrovnik church tried to block the Walk of Shame from filming, citing a city policy against “public displays of sexuality.” Producers still managed to get permission but had to switch a key scene to a different location within Old Town. The religious protest was ironic given the sequence’s striking similarity to one of the most iconic biblical stories: the Walk of Shame plays like a gender-swapped version of Jesus being forced to walk to his crucifixion through the streets of Jerusalem while he’s abused by a screaming crowd.

  Another production issue was far trickier to solve. Headey informed the producers she did not want to appear nude and suggested Cersei perform the penance partly clothed instead. In Martin’s book, Cersei was stripped naked, and the producers likewise believed nudity was essential to the sequence.

  DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): They’re trying to shame her. They’re trying to humiliate her as much as they possibly can. It’s supposed to be like a scene from a nightmare. And the nightmare is you’re walking naked in front of a city of people. It’s a common anxiety dream to be naked in front of people. I don’t think it’s as common that you’re in your pajamas in front of people. It’s much more horrific if they’ve just completely dehumanized you and taken off all your clothes and you have nothing to hide behind.

  LENA HEADEY: I chose not to be naked for many reasons. [After the episode aired] some people thought I was less of an actress because I didn’t get my tits out. That was really a bit shocking. I’ve done nudity. I’m not averse to it. But I’m a very emotional actor, and I get really driven by that. In order to do my job, I allow myself to be really vulnerable. I don’t know any other way to do my job. Things really affect me. The thought of being naked for three days and trying to contain her in the way she would be . . . I think I would feel very angry. I didn’t want to be angry. I don’t think Cersei would be angry. I film every year and I have kids and it was just too much on top of that.

  The production came up with a solution: Headey would perform the walk while wearing the plain Jane Shore–like shift, and they would cast another actress as her body double to perform the same walk nude and then merge the two actors with CGI—put Headey’s head on another actor’s body, stitching them together like a naked Frankenstein’s monster.

  The production put out a casting call, and roughly one thousand actresses applied for the role.

  DAVID NUTTER (director): The most difficult thing was to find an actress who could look like Lena but also knew how to copy Lena’s emotional state. I had to almost have a psychological therapy session with the actors. I said, “This is going to be a three-day event, and you have to be prepared for the fact that it’s very probable somebody will get a shot of this from the crowd and you’ll be trending as the most important thing online. Can you handle that?”

  Seven finalists were flown to Belfast for final auditions. Nutter and the producers gave the role to a newcomer, Rebecca Van Cleave.

  DAVID NUTTER: Rebecca was the only actress to do the audition with her underwear on; everybody else did it naked. But she had this quality that matched Lena, especially where her shoulders and neck were concerned.

  REBECCA VAN CLEAVE (Cersei’s body double): It was the most comfortable casting I’ve ever had, considering.

  LENA HEADEY: Rebecca is a great actress, and she was aware of what it was. It was a long process trying to find somebody who got what it means physically to be there. But people assume I picked her. Like I was in the casting and I demanded to have a hot body. In reality I said, “If somebody will do this, I have no choice about it, whatever you decide. If somebody is
brave enough to do it, I applaud it.” I had no judgment in that or desire to be involved. I wanted to clear that up, because as a woman that drives me mad—the thought I’m in a room going, “Nope! Nope!”

  To prepare for the scene, Headey and Van Cleave walked Cersei’s path through Old Town, discussing precisely how the character would feel and move as each stage unfolded.

  DAVID NUTTER: I wanted to make Lena and Rebecca feel like a team. So the day before shooting we went to the location and walked through it, so they had a great tag team as to what they were doing.

  LENA HEADEY: It was as helpful for her as she was for me. She was very cool and brave. It takes a lot to walk through the crowd naked for three days in a row with the crowd braying at you. I didn’t phone it in; I was there for three days with Rebecca.

  The costume department fashioned a pubic wig, or “merkin,” for Van Cleave, which became a source of backstage amusement.

  REBECCA VAN CLEAVE: It was hilarious dealing with the merkin and everything that came with it. On the first day the costume girls gave me a fake mustache instead of the merkin to wear, which was great. And a lot of bits of food got stuck in the merkin, so before every take we’d be like, “Check! . . . No, there’s a bit of bread in there.” Lena decided to name it “rice catcher.”

  BERNADETTE CAULFIELD (executive producer): We’re shooting it in a city where you’re surrounded by walls that looked down on our Walk of Shame. We covered most of [the view lines] with umbrellas. That was our biggest challenge. We wanted to protect her, and we wanted to make sure just everybody behaved and was respectful of the situation, and we didn’t want to offend anybody. We left very little exposed, so to speak.