The scene began with Cersei and Septa Unella at the top of Old Town’s famed Jesuit Stairs, which were used as the steps of the Sept of Baelor. The High Sparrow had led Cersei to believe she was being released from imprisonment after she “confessed” her sins, then revealed she would also have to perform a nude penance walk to get back home. From the stairs, Cersei could see her sanctuary of the Red Keep in the distance, but she would first have to trek through the bowels of a city full of people who despised her.
LENA HEADEY: She’s been beaten and starved and humiliated. She thinks when she comes out and confesses that this is it. Even when she was on her knees she’s partly lying. She thinks she’s good to go. She has no idea what’s coming when she walks out to the steps, or when they shave her hair off like Aslan.
REBECCA VAN CLEAVE: The first time I took off the robe there was all this anticipation building up to it. But it’s such an emotional experience for Cersei, you almost check out of the fact that you’re nude. You’re so in touch with the scene and what you’re going for.
Along the way, Cersei was escorted by the cruel Septa Unella, who rang a bell and chanted a word that served as chastisement for Cersei as well as a command to the wild crowd: “Shame . . . shame . . . shame . . .”
HANNAH WADDINGHAM (Septa Unella): This is something Unella does all the time. She’s taken a vow of silence [except for saying confess and shame], and her only function is to make people confess and then to rally the crowds to make people feel as low as they can feel so they can atone for their behavior. Then there are the times when I’m saying it more into Cersei’s ear; that’s really a worm getting inside her head. Everybody thinks she’s evil. I think she’s a simple person.
Time and time again, Headey and Van Cleave took turns walking the path as extras screamed every conceivable obscenity.
REBECCA VAN CLEAVE: We’ve been playing tag team—“You’re it!”—and trying to make light of the fact we’re all covered in everything and going through this together. Moments when I got all kinds of stuff thrown at me, with the chamber pots being [thrown out on her], and you realize, “This is all a bit much!”
HANNAH WADDINGHAM: That poor young girl had never done any naked work. When [the AD] shouted “cut,” she wasn’t standing there as Cersei, she was standing there as a naked woman. So I would battle my way through the crowd and wrap my habit around her until the costume department could get to her, because you’d have this load of guys just staring.
DAVID NUTTER: What was important there was to really sell the hate. The villagers, their disdain of her, as well as to make it violent. Sometimes Rebecca would be walking, and the background actors would have this look of awe. The first AD came up to them and said, “If you act like this, I’m going to have to take you off the set! Haven’t any of you ever seen a pussy before? Let it go!”
LENA HEADEY: It’s not hard when people are screaming at you and you look like shit and you’re being fucking humiliated [to express] how that would feel. I did what I thought she would do emotionally. And wonderful Rebecca was able to contain herself and be naked. She found it very difficult, obviously. It’s not a natural thing to do.
DAVID BENIOFF: Some of those shots we got, some of those close-ups, Lena had to go to a dark place to get the right emotion. It’s incredibly compelling, yet you almost want to turn away because you’re looking at someone who’s suffering.
DAVID NUTTER: I wanted to give her a little empathy because she’s still a mother who will do anything for her kids.
LENA HEADEY: I can maybe do two or three scenes if I’m—[suddenly Headey looked utterly anguished, then snapped back to appearing calm and composed]—and then my truth is finished. I fucking hate “lying” in a scene.
At one point, a man in the crowd dropped his pants and screamed at Cersei, “I’m a Lannister, suck me off!” The moment prompted a brief sidebar discussion among the director and producers. The actor was circumcised; was that a problem? Are men in Westeros cut or not? Benioff decided it didn’t matter (worst-case scenario, the man’s penis could be digitally fixed later).
As the march continued, Cersei’s stern composure began to crack and crumble. Tears flowed; she was a royal despot at her lowest moment. Cersei’s murderous crimes were selfish and evil, yet her punishment felt wrong too.
Once the Red Keep was finally in sight, Cersei stumbled. It was the point on set at which the crowd, so successfully riled up, had reached its maximum intensity.
HANNAH WADDINGHAM: At that point David Nutter had gotten the supporting performers to really be goading us, even me, who’s supposed to be stoic. Lena was bashed into, I was bashed into. Lena and I were quite shaken and in tears. The aggression . . .
David said to me, “Maybe you could help her up?” But because I had got so into the zone by then, I was like, “The best thing I can do is not help her up.” As a woman, let her get up herself and I’ll be smirking at her as if to say, “This is what you get for being dirty and incestuous and this is how you atone for your behavior.”
At last, Cersei crossed the bridge into the sanctuary of the Red Keep. The Mountain picked her up. Cersei was shamed and starved, abused and humiliated, yet not broken. Alyssa Rosenberg for The Washington Post wrote: “Game of Thrones has used nudity casually in previous seasons, but [season five was] a marked improvement, and this scene of shame and humiliation is a real high point for the series. In the march, Cersei’s whole body is exposed on occasion, but in a way that makes those of us watching at home complicit in the violence the Faith is doing to her. When unnamed characters, both men and women—in one of the rare cases of equal opportunity nudity on cable television—expose themselves to Cersei, it’s assaultive to her and to us. This is nakedness as violence towards a character we know, if not love, rather than lovingly photographed nudity, presented for the consumption of both corrupted characters like the former High Septon (Paul Bentley) and those of us watching at home.”
DAVID BENIOFF: What was really impressive about what David Nutter did with the scene is you feel what it would be like for this to happen to you. Obviously you, the viewer, are not standing in the street being pelted with shit and tomatoes and eggs and everything else, but he’s letting you feel it. A lot of the shots are first person. You feel quite viscerally the horror of that moment. And once you’ve been inside a character’s skin, it’s very hard to loathe them.
REBECCA VAN CLEAVE: It was one of the scariest, most wonderful experiences I could have imagined. I never in a million years would have thought I would be in Dubrovnik surrounded by hundreds of crew members and extras throwing food, but it was an amazing and gratifying experience. It helped me; I feel stronger than ever now.
LENA HEADEY: The thing about Cersei is she’s never going to be fully broken. There’s something in her that’s vengeful and angry and survivalist. You can break every bone in her body, but if there’s one left, she will fix it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Romance Dies
The Walk of Shame generated scrutiny and debate, but it wasn’t the most controversial scene in Game of Thrones. Nor was Shireen getting burned alive, the Red Wedding, Theon’s mutilation, or the death of Ned Stark. The show’s most controversial scene was (at least, by the subjective standards of media and fandom uproar) Sansa and Ramsay Bolton’s wedding night.
Arranged marriages are the norm in Westeros (as well as in many countries of the world today). Parents typically brokered unions between their children to gain money and power. Even Ned Stark and Catelyn Tully had an arranged marriage, with Catelyn gradually growing to love her husband.
So in season five, in an effort to consolidate his alliance with the Boltons, Littlefinger arranged a marriage between Sansa and Ramsay (he claimed Sansa wasn’t legitimately married to Tyrion since their union wasn’t consummated). The master manipulator persuaded Sansa that uniting the Stark and Bolton houses would be the best way for her family to regain Winterfell and protect her from the Lannisters,
who still falsely blamed her for Joffrey’s death.
There was just one problem: Ramsay was a psychopath. And despite Littlefinger’s “knowledge is power” proclamation, Baelish was unaware of Ramsay’s nature when he made the deal.
The result provoked a fierce debate over whether the arc was right from a story and character perspective, as well as whether it was handled in an appropriate way.
In Martin’s book, Ramsay’s wedding night is more shudderingly explicit (Theon is forced to participate), but the bride is someone else. Ramsay marries Sansa’s friend Jeyne Poole after Littlefinger managed to trick him into believing she was the long-missing Arya Stark.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): Jeyne Poole was included in the pilot—she’s shown giggling next to Sansa—but she’s never seen or referred to again. I actually wrote Jeyne into “The Pointy End,” my first script, when Arya killed the stableboy. I had some stuff with Jeyne running to Sansa being all hysterical and dialogue in the council chamber with Littlefinger saying, “Give her to me, I’ll make sure she doesn’t cause any trouble.” That was dropped.
DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): Sansa is a character we care about almost more than any other. We really wanted Sansa to play a major part in that season. If we were going to stay absolutely faithful to the book, it was going to be very hard to do that. There was a subplot we loved from the books, but it was a character not involved in the show.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I was trying to set up Jeyne for her future role as the false Arya. The real Arya has escaped and is presumed dead. But this girl has been in Littlefinger’s control for years, and he’s been training her. She knows Winterfell, has the proper northern accent, and can pose as Arya. Who the hell knows what a little girl you met two years ago looks like? When you’re a lord visiting Winterfell, are you going to pay attention to the little kids running around? So she can pull off the impersonation. Not having Jeyne, they used Sansa for that. Is that better or worse? You can make your decision there. Oddly, I never got pushback for that in the book because nobody cared about Jeyne Poole that much. They care about Sansa.
Thrones producers say Martin’s reasoning—that fans cared about Sansa, not Jeyne Poole—was also why they chose Sansa to marry Ramsay instead.
BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): You have this storyline with Ramsay. Do you have one of your leading ladies—who is an incredibly talented actor we’ve followed for five years and viewers love and adore—do it? Or do you bring in a new character to do it? You use the character the audience is invested in.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: My Littlefinger would have never turned Sansa over to Ramsay. Never. He’s obsessed with her. Half the time he thinks she’s the daughter he never had—that he wishes he had, if he’d married Catelyn. And half the time he thinks she is Catelyn, and he wants her for himself. He’s not going to give her to somebody who would do bad things to her. That’s going to be very different in the books.
BRYAN COGMAN: Our Littlefinger is a bit more brazen than the backroom dealer in the books—not to say that one is better than the other. And Ramsay’s not known everywhere as a psycho. Littlefinger doesn’t have that intelligence on him. He just knows the Boltons are scary and creepy and not to be fully trusted.
DAVID BENIOFF: The interesting thing about Littlefinger is he seems to have almost no weaknesses aside from his affection for Sansa. He’s been obsessed with her. You could see he’s got an unhealthy interest in her since that early episode at the joust. But as much as Littlefinger might care for Sansa, he cares for nothing more than power and sees this as an opportunity to gain more power for himself.
ALFIE ALLEN (Theon Greyjoy): There’s a common theme with both [Sansa and Theon’s] storylines of leaving Winterfell and having these delusions of grandeur about where they’d end up. Theon thought he was going to become prince of the ironborn, and Sansa thought she would end up queen. Then they both ended up together back at Winterfell.
The show’s writers, along with director Jeremy Podeswa, discussed how best to handle Sansa’s wedding night. On the production’s schedule breakdown the scene was called “Romance Dies.”
BRYAN COGMAN: The way we work is that David and Dan choose the episodes they want to write, and [Dave Hill and I] get the pick of the rest. I could have had poor Dave write it, but I felt a responsibility to Sophie. I felt and feel protective of her. I wanted to make sure it was sensitively handled, and I knew I would be the producer on set if I wrote it.
So originally the pitch in the room was that Ramsay takes her arm and we just shut the door. I made the argument that if we don’t at least take it a bit further and stay with her and Theon’s point of view a bit longer and get the enormity of the horror of what’s about to happen, then we’re doing a disservice to the story and to the subject matter.
JEREMY PODESWA (director): None of us went into that sequence lightly. We fully understood that the audience had so much invested in Sansa and saw her grow up on this show. This was something that would be shocking and upsetting, and we were all aware of that.
When filming season five, Turner was excited about the scene, as it represented a dramatic turn for her character and provided an acting challenge. “Alex Graves was saying, ‘You get a love interest,’” she said at the time. “So I get the scripts and I was so excited and I was flicking through and then I was like, ‘Aw, are you kidding me?!’ I thought the love interest was going to be Jaime Lannister or somebody who would take care of me. Then I found out it was Ramsay and I’m back at Winterfell. I love the fact she’s back home reclaiming what’s hers. At the same time, she’s being held prisoner in her own home. I felt so bad for her, but I also felt excited because it was so sick, and being reunited with Theon too, and seeing how their relationship plays out. I think it’s going to be the most challenging season for me so far just because it’s so emotional.
“I like getting my teeth into scenes,” Turner added. “There are scenes that are quite emotional and quite terrifying and uncomfortable, but I love doing them. If you can start with the uncomfortable and make the audience feel like that, that’s great.”
The filming of the sequence, at least, did not have the darkly intense mood backstage that one might have expected.
MICHAEL MCELHATTON (Roose Bolton): The wedding in the snow. Alfie was sniffing and dribbling and crying, and Sophie was practically crying and shaking, and I’m gloating and smiling. It was so Machiavellian, so dark, and so horrific, what we were doing to Alfie and Sophie, that it just tipped into laughter on a number of occasions.
JEREMY PODESWA: We were very careful in the way it was shot, and we were very careful in making sure that Sophie was comfortable with everything. She understood the complexity of what was happening and the horror of it, but she was never in a situation where she was made uncomfortable.
ALFIE ALLEN: I knew there was going to be a huge reaction to it, and I thought that everyone involved did a fantastic job. It was a horrible day to shoot. Iwan was having a real tough time with it. But Jeremy Podeswa smashed it. Sophie was amazing, and the way she handled it was admirable. It was pretty light in between takes.
For the bedroom scene, Ramsay bent Sansa over the bed and tore the back of her dress. Then the camera cut to an emotionally wrecked Theon for a protracted moment as he was forced to watch. The filmmakers wanted and expected an emotional reaction from viewers, but they were stunned when the episode generated an unprecedented amount of uproar.
JEREMY PODESWA: We were all taken aback by the reaction. We knew people would be upset but not so specifically in the way that manifested. From the reaction you would imagine the scene was explicit and insensitive. You see virtually nothing. You see the beginning of something about to happen and then we cut away. It was unthinkable to actually show what was happening.
Focusing on Theon’s face for the scene’s final twenty seconds as Sansa’s cries are heard off camera was specifically cited as promoting “the male gaze,”
a term used to describe art that focuses on a man’s perspective while women are portrayed as objects. “Encouraging the viewers to feel sympathy for Greyjoy rather than the young woman being violently raped was a woefully misguided choice,” Nina Bahadur wrote in Self. The filmmakers thought cutting to Theon was the least exploitative, yet still dramatic and visual, way to convey the horror of what Sansa was experiencing.
BRYAN COGMAN: What’s always bothered me about any criticism of David and Dan is a presumption of bad faith on their part—the idea that David and Dan, or I or George, or any of us, are playing fast and loose with these characters that we love and have lived with and lost sleep over a hell of a lot more than anyone else has.
One of the main reasons we cut over to Theon was so it would not be graphic. Then that was criticized. I understood that criticism when thinking about it. I still understand our reasons for doing it.
JEREMY PODESWA: I understand the issue around the male gaze—that we’re away from Sansa’s experience in that moment and with Theon. The intention was to be as sensitive as possible. I think from a storytelling point of view it was very strong. And I think from a performance point of view it was very strong.
The filmmakers also wondered if there would have been less protest had viewers known the rest of Sansa’s journey in advance, just as book readers had known about the Red Wedding and other traumatic twists. Martin’s readers often defended tragic story moves online after they aired in the show because they had a clear sense of how such events fueled the story moving forward. Producers say the lady of Winterfell’s triumphant turn in the later seasons was always the show’s secret plan (and not, as some speculated, a reaction to the wedding-night uproar).
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