Game of thrones
Winter is coming faster now to Westeros, and the three-eyed raven is upon us. He has the power to show you the future — but to trounce any spoilers, the forthcoming drama's darkest secrets won't be revealed until April 12. Don't panic thyself in haste, though, because the characters you love, those you love to hate, and some to whom you've bid farewell sat down at the Comic-Con®
Game of Thrones® panel to answer a few questions.
Season 5 premieres April 12 at 9pm ET/PT.
Behind the Scenes
The cast and creators opened up at Comic-Con® about everything from
sword fighting to getting kicked out of filming locations. Click on the photos below.
Kit Harington Jon Snow
On Jon and Ygritte's brief reunion:
"I think it was an important moment for us. What I wanted to try and capture is that he was just happy to see her again, really, at the heart of it. After everything that's happened, he doesn't really care in some ways if that arrow is loosed and he dies. He got to see her one last time, and that moment is obviously broken with what happens next, but I think it's a beautiful moment for him that's quite profound. There's a silence that we wanted to get."
On preparation for battle scenes:
"A lot of the work is done for you before you even get there. A big part for me is costume because there are such wonderful costumes ... and when I put it on and it's got some weight to it, it gives a certain gravity. I'm about to go back and start my first day on Monday and I'm excited — it's a great scene — but I get my hair dyed, and I get back into that costume, and it's very grounding. That's how I fall into Jon Snow. It's not very exciting. Many, many hair products."
Sophie Turner Sansa Stark
On being separated from Tyrion:
[Sarcastically] "I think it's devastating. He was my other half. We loved each other so much, you could feel the love. But they really did actually begin to have this genuine bond and trust with each other, and it was just getting kind of beautiful and then in the spirit of Game of Thrones® they cut that off. But I would like in the future for them to be reunited at some point because I think they'd be a pretty awesome power couple in the future, like the new Brangelina. It was a really lovely relationship and she was finally beginning to trust him and love him as just a person. They were really on each other's team."
On growing with her character:
"When I started, I didn't have a plan for her. It sounds really gross and pretentious, but I kinda grew with her as an actress while she grew as a character. I mean, it's really down to the writing, and when I got the scripts through for Season 4, it was such a relief, because for the past three seasons she's been deceiving with the façade of her former self for so long and it was such a relief for me to finally be able to shed the skin and become this manipulator that she actually is from being at court with Cersei and Tywin, and she finally gets to reveal herself, and it was awesome."
George R.R. Martin Game of thrones Book author
On how he feels about scenes that differ from the books:
"The things I mourn are, for the most part, the scenes that didn't make it. I've been pretty open since before Season 1, and I wish we had three more episodes a season. It would, of course, have killed [show creators] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] — I realize that.
On character inspiration:
"You know, you draw on yourself particularly for the viewpoint characters. You may base them on people you know, on people from history, on your imagination, but ultimately for the character to come alive when you're writing from inside them, you have to delve into yourself. Fortunately, 'I am large, I contain multitudes,' as I think Walt Whitman said. I've never been a princess or a dwarf or an eight-year-old girl, but I think the common humanity unites all these characters, and we all have that in common. That's what I try to draw on when creating characters. A lot of Game of Thrones® is stolen from Scottish history — bloody and disparaging. I love the Black Dinner and the Glencoe Massacre."
On how the show affects his view of Westeros:
"I mean, I started this in 1991, and I didn't have my first meeting with Dave and Dan until 2007, I believe. So there were, like, 16 years before the show was a twinkle in anyone's eye. I had very strong pictures of what Westeros looked like and what the characters looked like, but these people have brought the characters to life amazingly. I still had those 16 years that took deep root before the show came along … the show is the show and the books are the books. I keep them separately."
John Bradley Samwell Tarly
On filming in the cold:
"I think what the show really excels in is putting the actors into the same environment as the characters would find themselves. If the characters are that cold, we tend to be that cold. When we were in Iceland, we thought that we were walking on the ground. We were actually walking on five feet of compacted snow. So if you get my costume, which weighs a fair amount on its own, put me in it, which is never going to help anything, then have me charge across a glacier being chased by a camera on a quad bike, chances are that by the end of the day I've been driven into the ground like a tent peg."
On filming in the cold:
"People say, ‘Man, those costumes must really keep you warm!' — and they do — but as an actor, your face is your tool. You find your performance completely compromised, because you can't be subtle at all, because your face is freezing up — literally freezing up. And at minus 35 [degrees Celsius], you're at work and you're thinking, ‘OK, if I'm ever this cold in my life again, something's gone badly wrong.'"
Rory McCann The Hound
On his fight scene with Gwendoline Christie (Brienne) … and where he kicked her:
"It was really good fun. I've never done it before. I've always wanted to. But here's a little secret. The idea is to put a strap between your knees so when you were crawling in that one move I could take a right good run at it but we'd still keep it safe. She punched me right between the legs. When she bit my ear it kind of tickled, to be honest. It was like, ‘Get off me.'"
On his training for sword fighting:
"I didn't go to drama college and didn't learn sword fighting, but I grew up in Glasgow and we use a thing called a chib. It's like a sword but it's got nails at the end with a stick. That seems to do the trick."
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss Show creators
On shooting locations (and losing them):
WEISS: "We shoot in Belfast during the entire shooting season, but we also have other foreign locations which vary from year to year. This year it's going to be Croatia and Spain. In past years we've been in Malta and Morocco and Iceland. We lost a location this year to a man who did not want his property to be involved with [the production]."
On production sequence and organization:
BENIOFF: "We shoot it as if it's a ten-hour movie. Last year we shot scenes from the tenth episode in the first week. We shoot in three different countries this year: in Ireland, Spain, and Croatia. Five different directors shoot two episodes each. The actors have to kind of travel all over the place. It's called crossboarding, which is just an expression meaning that wherever is the best time for a scene to shoot, it's going to shoot in two separate units: the Dragon Unit and the Wolf Unit."
