'Game of Thrones' will make the internet 'melt' this season with long-wanted showdown
Less than a month away from Game of Thrones' heavily anticipated seventh season, Time dropped a huge article that shed a lot of light on your favorite fantasy show.
Time's large spread interviewed the cast, creators, and crew to provide a wider panorama of the quest to sit upon the Iron Throne. And while many of the facts will be known to die-hard fans, the story still dropped many nuggets of gold that might help even the most knowledgable of Lannisters pay their debts.
Here are the most necessary takeaways from Time's big story:
1. The creators couldn't quite get across that Jaime and Cersei were siblings in the pilot
Apparently, the first filming of the pilot had a very difficult time showing audiences that star-crossed Lannister lovers Jaime and Cersei were brother and sister, so they had to rework their scenes.
From the article:
They also had trouble portraying Martin’s nuanced characters. “Our friends—really smart, savvy writers—didn’t [realize] Jaime and Cersei were brother and sister,” says [Creator Marc] Benioff of the ill-fated first cut. Ultimately, they reshot the pilot.
2. Though incest is a pretty big subplot between those Lannisters, that's not the way Jaime portrayer, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, likes to see it
“I’ve never really gone too deep into the whole sister-brother thing because I can’t use that information. I have to look at her as the woman he loves and desires. Lena’s a very good actress, and that’s kind of what carries the whole thing.” Coster-Waldau told Time. “I have two older sisters. I do not want to go there. It’s just too weird.”’
3. Jon Snow will grow up
In the article, Jon Snow actor Kit Harington admitted that the King of the North has always not acted terribly kingly. In the upcoming seasons, Harrington admitted that the last Stark male (sorry Theon) will take up the mantle of maturity as he heads south.
"[T]his year there is this huge seismic shift where all of what he’s learned over the years, suddenly …” Harington told Time. “He’s still the same Jon, but he grows up.”
4. Emilia Clarke has to put up with a whole lot for a little
Emilia Clarke's Daenerys Targaryen has had to deal with probably more varied environments and characters than any other person on the show, and it takes a lot of time to make even the shortest scene happen. It doesn't help that her three biggest costars are enormous CGI dragons.
When I first met Clarke in Belfast, she was shooting on the back of a dragon. When I leave a week later, she’s still at it. “Thirty seconds of screen time and she’s been here for 16 days,” the episode’s director, Taylor, remarks at one point. Later on, I’d remember this moment of exhaustion when Weiss described seeing the buck for the first time. He went on to add, “It probably feels a bit less amazing to Emilia, who sits on it for eight hours a day, six weeks in a row, getting blasted with water and fake snow and whatever else they decide to chuck at her through the fans.”
5. Peter Dinklage reads the episodes backwards
The portrayer of Tyrion Lannister knows that anything may happen in each episode (surely he learned to be very afraid after so many characters have died) and so he's not taking any chances when he reviews the scripts.
“Every season I go to the last page of the last episode and go backward,” Dinklage told Time. “I don’t do that with books, but I can’t crack open page one of Episode 1 not knowing if I’m dead or not.”
6. There will be an epic clash this season and the "internet will melt"
Though we assume that each GoT season will deliver some lasting gut punch that leaves us spending each autumn in recovery, one revelation from the Time story puts some extra coal in the Season 7 hype train furnace.
Apparently, the Time reporter saw a pretty impressive face off between two unnamed characters. The mysterious description has our brains turning and our impatience growing.
One of those big events this season is a battle whose sheer scope, even before being cut together with the show’s typical brio, dazzled me. In order to get on set, I agreed not to divulge the players or what’s at stake. (Thrones has been promising this clash all along, and when the time comes, the Internet will melt.) It will be all the more impressive knowing that the cast and crew were shot through with a frigid North Atlantic wind that whipped everyone during filming and sent them all flying to the coffee cart during resets. (The cold, a prosthetic artist tells me, is at least good for keeping the makeup on.)
What battle could this be you ask? Perhaps the long-awaited Clegane-bowl. Or the clash in the North featuring Jon Snow that was teased in the latest trailer. We're betting that the use of the word "melt" wasn't an accident, which also strongly hints at dragons.
7. If you have any concern over where the writing is heading, rest assured that the creators know how the story ends
In what is a genuinely striking sentence, Co-creator D.B. Weiss said that they already know how the final episode will play out. After almost a decade of watching, we will finally know whose posterior will rest on the Iron Throne.
"We know what happens in each scene,” says Weiss.
Game of Thrones returns July 16.
Topics Game Of Thrones
I have done neat stuff all over these United States from sailing lessons on the Puget Sound to motorcycle maintenance on the backroads of upstate New York. My professional experience extends from newspaper reporting in the mountains of Eastern Oregon to fixing espresso machines throughout Kentucky. I also have kept a cat alive for 10 years.
